Ernesta & Dominico

Ernesta Casazza with first husband Dominico, May 1898

My great grandmother, Ernesta Casazza, immigrated to the United States from Torriglia, Italy when she was 24 years old. She traveled on a ship named the S.S. Fulda, leaving Genoa, Italy on April 21, 1898. She was accompanied on this life-changing journey by her brother Pietro.

According to the ship’s manifest, Ernesta’s passage was paid for by her brother. The manifest also shows that Pietro carried with him $50 which in comparison to the other passengers was quite a lot of money, and that their final destination was Newcastle, Washington.

Newcastle was a coal mining town about twelve miles east of Seattle. Today, Newcastle is an upscale suburb with a world class golf course that draws people from all over the world. But back in 1898, the draw was coal.

The S.S. Fulda reached Ellis Island in New York City on May 5, 1898, two weeks after leaving Italy. On May 16th, a short eleven days after arrival in New York, Ernesta was married to 30-year-old Dominico Casazza, a coal miner, in a ceremony taking place in Seattle. I do not know how Ernesta traveled from New York to Seattle, but typically in 1898 it would have been by train taking 4 days or more to reach Seattle.

Ernesta’s new husband, Dominico, was not my great grandfather. Rather, he was Ernesta's first husband whose tragic death in a coal mine fire a little over two years later would set the course for Ernesta to marry the next-door neighbor of her cousin Mary – my great grandfather Giovanni Balzarini.

Cousin Mary and brother Pietro were not the only relatives of Ernesta to immigrate to the coal mining towns east of Seattle. The S.S. Fulda’s manifest names a brother, Luigi, as the siblings’ contact in Newcastle. Like her new husband Dominico, brother Luigi Casazza was a coal miner. I find him in census records living in Black Diamond, another coal mining town about twenty miles south of Newcastle where family knowledge suggests he lived and raised his family.

Another sibling, sister Matilda, who may have been the first of Ernesta's siblings to immigrate, died in Black Diamond in 1891 following the birth of her son Amerigo. He was later sent back to Italy to be raised by family.

Ernesta's cousin Mary Casazza also lived in Black Diamond according to the 1900 census. She and her husband Luigi Maragliano and their five children were neighbors of Giovanni Balzarini. Giovanni was a 41-year-old bachelor who owned his own home according to the same census and who would later marry Ernesta.

I expect to write more about these ancestors in future posts, but for now suffice it to say that the newlywed Ernesta was not alone in her new country. Like the other family lines I research, immigration for the Casazzas was a family affair. Dominico too had at least one brother, Carlo Casazza, living in the area and working in the mine with him. Unfortunately, he also lost his life on the fateful day of the mine fire, August 21, 1900.

You might be wondering by now if Ernesta and Dominico were related since they both went by the surname Casazza before marriage. Family knowledge is that they were not related. However, as a genealogist this is a research question that remains on my “to do list.”

The good news is that it appears from publicly available marriage records that they were not siblings. In Washington at that time, couples listed their parents’ names on a document called a Marriage Return. Dominico’s parents were identified as Dominico Casazza and Augusta Dondiera. Ernesta’s parents were identified as Nicolo Casazza and Chiara Barbieri. I also note for those researching this family that Dominico's first name, signed by him on the Marriage Certificate, is spelled Dominico (it is spelled variously in records and online as Domenico or Dominica).

According to the 1900 census taken just two months prior to the tragic fire, Ernesta and Dominico were living in Gilman, Washington in a house owned by Dominico free of any mortgage. The census record shows that neither of them could speak English. However, it also shows that they were both educated in that they could read and write.

The 1900 census takers were instructed to mark “yes” if the person could read or write "the language ordinarily spoken by them." So, it is possible that Ernesta and Dominico, who both spoke Italian, could read and write in Italian but not in English at the time of the 1900 census. We may never know for sure.

The 1900 census also confirms that Ernesta had not given birth to any children as of June 3, 1900, when the census taker visited their house. We know this because the 1900 census recorded both the number of children born to a woman, as well as the number of her children living at the time of the census. For Ernesta there are zeros in both boxes of the census schedule. My own research into birth records produced nothing for Ernesta in this period as well.

Gilman, where they lived in 1900, was a coal mining town located about thirteen miles east of Newcastle. Its name was changed by the Washington Legislature in 1899 to Issaquah, a city that is now a popular suburb of Seattle. However, in the census of 1900, it was still referred to as Gilman Town.

Gilman was situated close to the coal mines in the nearby mountains south of town, including the mine where Dominico sadly died. The mine Dominico worked at was owned by the Issaquah Coal Company.

The mine fire on August 21, 1900, that killed Dominico, was covered extensively in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper. The day after the fire a lengthy article ran that started like this:

Five miners were smothered to death at the Issaquah Coal Company’s mines at this place this forenoon. A brush fire spread to the mouth of an air shaft, ignited the timbers and was sucked down by the ventilation fan into the workings where eighty men were employed.

All the miners who were near the exit escaped, but Dominick Cassassas, Carlos Cassassas, C.M. Vowell, Ben Laws and John Lind were in a remote chamber and were overcome by smoke and black damp. Their bodies were recovered this afternoon.

The newspaper went on to report that:

The Cassassas brothers were found lying dead together on the gangway near breast 166, where they worked. Vowell lay dead at the foot of No. 167. The three men had been carrying their coats, hats and dinner pails and one had a pick.

The article said that:

The accident was peculiar and the first of any consequence to happen in the Issaquah mines, long known as the safest in the state.

The paper also included an account of the harrowing attempt to rescue the Casazza brothers and their co-worker Vowell, which led to the death of two more miners, Laws and Lind. They and one other man named Beisell re-entered the mine to try to rescue the others, but due to the smoke and fumes one by one they fell to the ground unable to breath or walk. Beisell was eventually able to crawl to within sight of the entrance where he himself was rescued.

A coroner’s inquest into the cause of the five deaths began immediately with the coroner arriving on the scene the same day as the fire. The inquest took place the next day with a jury of six people. The Seattle P-I newspaper reported that one witness testified he tried to warn the Casazza brothers.

a boy yet in his teens, employed as a track cleaner in the mine, testified positively that he called up to [them], and that they shouted back to him, although he did not understand what they said. “The damp was down in the gangway then,” he said, “and I don’t know whether they had time to get out.”

The inquest ended the same day it began with a verdict that the deaths of the five miners, including the Casazza brothers, were indeed caused by a forest fire that entered the mine through an air shaft. No liability was attributed to the mining company.

But that was not the end of the story. It turns out that the family of C.M. Vowell, the miner who died with the Casazza brothers, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Issaquah Coal Company. The lawsuit brought out more facts about the fire and the company’s role in failing to take safety measures. As a result, the company lost the lawsuit, and the Vowell family was awarded $10,000 in damages, an equivalent of about $330,000 today.

As lawsuits with large verdicts tend to go, the company appealed the judgement to the Washington (state) Supreme Court but lost there too. The paragraph below is a quote from the Court’s opinion finding that the company was liable for Vowell’s death – it’s worth reading:

The court certifies that plaintiffs produced evidence tending to prove that the air shaft of defendant's mine opened into a forest; that the defendant had knowingly and negligently permitted large quantities of chips and forest debris to accumulate around the mouth of the air shaft; that it was the summer season, and that the chips and debris had become very inflammable; that this condition had been known to the defendant; that forest fires had been of frequent occurrence in the vicinity in former years; that forest fires surrounding the shaft had existed several days preceding this fire in the mine which resulted in Vowell's death, and that the day preceding the fire in the mine there was fire between the air shaft and the company's mine, and the company's officers knew that fact; that there was no watchman stationed at the mouth of the air shaft, or in that vicinity; that the air shaft was the sole means of ventilating the mine, which was effected by a powerful fan at the other entrance of the mine upon the opposite side of the mountain; that the fan, in its usual operation, sucked or drew the air into the mine through the air shaft, causing a strong current of air to flow into the mine, the entrance to which at the air shaft was strengthened by large timbers and lagging; that just prior to decedent's death he, with others, was engaged in mining coal inside the mine; that, as a result of the foregoing alleged facts, the fires burning in the forests were communicated to the timbers in the mouth of the shaft, and were drawn by the air current some 200 feet into the mine, creating dense volumes of smoke, which passed into the mine workings, and resulted in decedent's death; that, had the fan been reversed, the current of air would have carried out the smoke, and averted the death of decedent, and that due care required such a course.

Even though the Court found that the Issaquah Coal Company was liable for Vowell’s death, the Court reduced the verdict from $10,000 to $6,000 because the Court felt the verdict was excessive and not a correct reflection of Vowell’s potential future earnings if he had lived. Vowell was 55 years old and making $50 per month at the time of his death. The Court did not believe he would continue to make that much for his entire life expectancy of 72 years.

With regard to the Casazza family, unfortunately, I do not know anything about what happened to Ernesta on August 21, 1900, or in the days immediately following the death of Dominico. Nor do I know much about his brother Carlo’s family. I wonder if the Casazzas even knew of the lawsuit filed by the Vowell family and the verdict in their favor.

Giovanni Balzarini & Ernesta Casazza

On a happier note, I can confirm that within 11 months of Dominico’s death, Ernesta married Giovanni Balzarini on April 20, 1901, in Seattle. At the time of her marriage to Giovanni, Ernesta was 28 years old. He was 42. The Marriage Return shows that Ernesta was no longer living in Gilman, but was now a resident of Black Diamond, and was working as a housekeeper at the time of her marriage to Giovanni. Ernesta gave birth to their first child, Clara, on May 27, 1902. The couple would go on to have a total of 7 children, all in Black Diamond, 6 of whom survived to adulthood

Sources:

Marriage, immigration, and census records

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 22, 1900, and August 23, 1900

Spokesman Review, August 22, 1900

Vowell v. Issaquah Coal Company, 71 P. 725 (WA 1903)

Websites of Issaquah, Newcastle, and Black Diamond Historical Societies

Washington Dept. of Natural Resources website