Erica Maniez walked through a house on Southeast Andrews Street and into the backyard. The house — a 130-year-old wooden two-story — was the Gilman Town Hall Museum and the backyard contained a low-slung concrete bunker. Maniez, the director of the Issaquah History Museums, walked inside.

She came out holding a boot with spiky nails poking out of its soles. By this time, most of the dozen people that had been milling around the exhibits in the museum had come outside, forming a loose semi-circle around Maniez. She spoke.

“This concrete building was the city of Issaquah’s second jail,” she said. “You might have noticed I said ‘second.’ When we were at the hatchery and we walked by the white building that has Rogue Ales and Spirits inside now, right around there, there used to be a small wooden building that the city used as its first jail.

“Now, this thing I’m holding in my hands,” she said, holding up her boot. “This is a cork boot.”

Cork boots, she continued, were necessary footwear for loggers. The nails in their soles allowed loggers to penetrate wood and earth with their footsteps and create traction on rain-slick surfaces. At one time, many loggers called Issaquah home. Many of those loggers drank. And on any given night, some of them would be thrown into jail until they sobered up.

“One night, two men were put into the first jail after a night of drinking and the guard forgot to take away their cork boots,” Maniez said. “So he left and they kicked down the building. Then they went home for the night.”

The story was just one told over the course of Saturday’s Issaquah History Walk, part of a roughly monthly series of tours put on by the Issaquah History Museums from March to October. Maniez led Saturday’s walk around Olde Town. On June 20, museum Docent Doug Bristol will lead a tour through Grand Ridge Park to an old coal mining site.

Neither person shies away from the darker details of the city’s history. Topics on Saturday’s walk included chronic public drunkenness, the likelihood of injury and death for the city’s miners and loggers, and the city’s single recorded hanging — the 1889 lynching of a man who attempted to murder a wife and husband by blowing up their home with dynamite, instead killing three others. The details of that story are up for debate: Some say the perpetrator was a jilted lover, and the blown up site was a boarding hotel. An article in the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean from that year identified the bomber as Albert Schaeffer, targeting George Bodala and his wife in their home and instead killing their 9-year-old daughter and two boarders.

“In history, there’s a difference between what really happened and how we perceive what happened,” Maniez said.

Case in point: Many might brag that Issaquah had electricity before Seattle, but fewer will mention that the difference in time was about 90 seconds — the time it took to travel on the power line.

Everything is approached with a veneer of humor and Maniez and Bristol keep up a relaxed environment. The path of the walk itself sticks to a mostly chronological retelling of early city history. However, that path loops up, down, back, forth and back again as it attempts to follow time. Some of the stops are informal, guided by the interests of the people on the tour.

And for every story of old-timey horror or ignorance on the path, there’s a tale of humor, hope and humans relying on each other in a time when it was a necessary way of life.

Case in point: The Oddfellows. Few people realize the Oddfellows began as a guild for people with unusual jobs. In Issaquah, the group functioned as an important social circle and benefactor for the city, building projects like the Hillside Cemetery.

They also provided the most rudimentary insurance for its members: If a logger lost his hand, or a miner suffocated on dangerous gases, the Oddfellows would pony up to support the newly unemployable man or his survivors.

“It wasn’t much,” Maniez said. “But it was something.”