Roslyn: Coal, Community, and Northern Exposure

Roslyn was built to dig coal. The Northern Pacific Railroad opened the mines in eighteen eighty-six and recruited workers from across Europe and from the American South, making Roslyn one of the most ethnically diverse coal towns in the Pacific Northwest. African American miners arrived early enough to establish their own fraternal lodge, and the town's cemetery still has more than twenty separate sections organized by nationality and fraternal order, a physical record of its plural origins.

When the last mine closed in nineteen sixty-three, Roslyn nearly vanished. It survived as a quiet mountain town until nineteen ninety, when the CBS series Northern Exposure used its main street as the fictional Cicely, Alaska, bringing a decade of tourism and a permanent place in television history.