The Fournier family
Perhaps no local family sums up the hardships, the ethnic heritage, and the joys of living in Newcastle the way the Fourniers do. Although not many still carry the family name, the spirit of the Fourniers lives on in many local residents.
Marcel Fournier was born in Quebec, Canada in 1828. He married Julie Morin in 1850, and they had eight children. Following a charismatic Catholic priest, Fournier immigrated to Illinois in the 1850s. In the 1880s, he and two sons arrived at the Newcastle mines on Cougar Mountain. All three worked as mine carpenters for the Oregon Improvement Company, and a daughter married Newcastle pioneer Thomas Henry Rouse.
One of the sons, Theodore Wallace Fournier, was popular and well-known in the multi-national camp. In 1892, he married Frances Craig the daughter of an English widow who ran a Newcastle boarding house. Five months later, with their first child on the way, Theodore was killed in a rock fall in the No. 3 slope mine.
Theodore and Frances’ daughter Esilda lived her entire life in Newcastle, not far from the mine that took her father. She married a Swedish immigrant, Ernest Swanson, who was also a carpenter for the coal company. Her five children-Frances, John, Milton, Ruth and George-are well known in the greater community. And George’s daughter, Lorraine Morton, continues the family tradition of popularity in her job as assistant to the Issaquah school superintendent.
Living in Newcastle, the Fourniers never got rich or famous, and often faced more hard times than good. But they found their happiness within their community of friends and family, and never strayed far from home.
