Landsburg Mine Collapse: Four Men Lost in the Mountain

On January twenty-ninth, nineteen fifty-five, four miners were killed when a section of the Landsburg mine collapsed approximately one thousand feet north of this memorial. John Kovash, Louis Vaiente, Frank Stebly, and Nathan Russell died in the collapse and were buried beneath the mountain. Their remains were never recovered.

The four headstones here mark the place where the men were lost rather than where they were buried, because the collapse sealed the tunnel permanently. Mining in the foothills of the Cascade Range east of Seattle had long been part of the region's industrial economy, extracting coal and other resources from the mountains. Accidents like this one were not uncommon in mid-century mining, where underground geology could shift without warning. This quiet memorial in the trees keeps the names of four working men who did not come home.