The Kirkland Steel Mill that Never Was

Introduction

The story of the Kirkland Steel Mill began in the iron districts of northern England. Peter Kirk spent decades in the iron works industry as an inventor and visionary before setting foot in the Pacific Northwest. Kirk’s family operated an iron foundry for one hundred years in Chapel en le Frith, Derbyshire. Peter was born in 1840, the youngest in a family of three brothers and one sister. He learned the iron business from the ground up by working in the foundry with his father, brothers, uncles, and cousins from an early age. For unknown reasons, his father moved his family to Workington in 1860, where Peter quickly distinguished himself in the ironworks industry by buying an idle wrought iron foundry with his brothers and restarting it.

In 1865, Peter married Mary Ann Quirk. By 1870, confident in his abilities and eager for independence, he left the family business to establish his own iron works with his brother-in-law Charles Valentine in Workington. The partners showed initiative, forward-thinking, and a tendency for efficiency. In 1877, they built one of the first Bessemer steel plants in Workington and early on used ladle cars to directly transport the molten ore from the blast furnaces to the Bessemer converters. Their success was fueled by a multitude of inventions Peter Kirk patented starting in 1866, when he was just 26 years old. The patents mainly addressed fuel and labor-saving technology but also included new rail products. Their enterprise—Moss Bay Hematite Iron & Steel Company—became a highly successful rail producer. Kirk was now positioned as a respected industrialist. But the global iron market was shifting beneath his feet.

By the mid-1880s, an extended downturn in the British iron industry forced Kirk to consider new strategies. The British iron market once dominated the world but had been dwindling for years as America expanded her coast-to-coast rail system. American tariffs also made it difficult for foreign producers to compete. Kirk embarked on a fact finding tour of the United States, hoping to determine whether a Moss Bay subsidiary in the U.S. could stabilize the company’s future. What he found astonished him. America’s natural gas, cheap coal, abundant ore, and vast transportation networks were transforming the industry. As he told the Pittsburgh Post in 1886, “A new era has dawned for America… England can no longer compete with America in iron products.” That realization — paired with a large rail order from the Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Railroad and promising reports about the Denny iron deposits — drew him westward to Seattle.

A Frontier Vision

Seattle in the late 1880s was a frontier city still recovering from the Great Fire of 1889. Kirkland, across Lake Washington, was even more remote. The 1888 Polk directory didn’t list it at all; supplies had to be shipped by steamboat. (It did list Houghton and Juanita.) Yet Kirk saw opportunity in this wilderness. The region was 1,600 miles closer to western railroads than England, and it offered access to emerging markets across Asia and the Americas.

But significant challenges remained. Seattle and Tacoma were locked in a bitter rivalry. The Northern Pacific Railroad controlled transportation and coal, limiting Kirk’s leverage. Questions lingered about the quantity and quality of local iron ore. As an immigrant, Kirk faced legal restrictions on business ownership. Still, he doggedly pursued a mill.

1880-1890: Laying the Groundwork

Kirk and his partners began assembling the pieces of an industrial ecosystem: a mill company, a land company, and a lumber company. Early plans placed the mill at lake level, near what is now Kirkland Urban. But the Northern Pacific refused to build rail lines down the steep hill. The town plat was amended in 1890, relocating the mill site more than 200 feet higher on Rose Hill to a 100-acre site, stretching from present-day Costco eastward to 124th Ave NE.

Kirk saw great promise in the area. The western US was still expanding, and he saw the bigger picture of West Coast access supplying Asian and South American markets that were on the brink of their own expansion, because the nearest competitor was 1600 miles away to the east. He estimated the demand to be great considering the new markets, new lines, and replacement rails for the existing western US railroads. Kirk planned to build a steel mill with a capacity of 3000 tons a week, like his England plant, and far exceeding anything on the west coast.

Kirk envisioned not just a mill, but a community that was family oriented and free from speculation. He personally analyzed more than 50 samples of ore, coal, clay, and limestone from sites across Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and the San Juan Islands, due diligence for his belief that Kirkland was to become a major industrial center.

Meanwhile, Seattle’s business elite pursued their own ambitions. The Lake Washington Belt Line Company, incorporated in 1890, sought to create an industrial corridor along the lake’s eastern shore. A steel mill in Kirkland was central to their plan. But the Belt Line’s success depended heavily on cooperation from the Northern Pacific — cooperation that never fully materialized.

1891-1892: Full Steam Ahead

Despite obstacles, construction surged forward. Moss Bay reorganized as the Great Western Iron & Steel Company, and spending accelerated. Workers cleared land, graded slopes, erected structures, and purchased equipment. The company bought machinery and supplies—about 5600 tons worth—that was stored on site. The foundry, machine shop, pattern shop and blacksmith shop were all completed along with ore bunkers. Transportation infrastructure expanded: roads were built, rail lines were surveyed, and efforts continued to attract complementary industries, including the Eyanson Woolen Mill in 1892.

The surviving evidence from this period, including photographs, maps, newspaper clippings, bills of sale, and later academic work, paints a picture of intense activity. Phase 1 construction produced mill shop buildings, bunkers, track, supply stacks, a tramway, a brick plant, a water tower, and housing. The mill was becoming real!

1893-1894: Collapse

Then everything fell apart.

The Seattle Fire of 1889 had already drained local capital. The failure to advance the Lake Washington ship canal stalled regional industrial growth. The Panic of 1893 — one of the worst financial crises in U.S. history — dried up outside investment. The bankruptcy of both the SLS&E and the Northern Pacific compounded the uncertainty.

The mill, still incomplete, could not survive. Construction halted. Investors withdrew. The dream slipped away.

Much of the intended design remains speculative. Few plans survive, so our team relied on maps, photo analysis, operational logic, Kirk company precedents in England, and typical U.S. steel practices to infer what Phases 2–5 might have looked like. CAD models helped us visualize both what was built and what might have been.

1895-1909: Persistence and Reinvention

Peter Kirk didn’t abandon his dream for Kirkland. He invested in a local ferry business to generate capital. He continued investing, believing that new technologies might someday revive the steelworks. In 1899, he told the Yakima Herald that the return on his $300,000 investment was “buried in the womb of the future.” His wife’s inheritance helped the family survive the downturns, and he consulted to generate income and to produce patents, waiting for the day to realize his vision.

1910: The Final Chapter

By 1910, lawsuits were settled, debts resolved, and the townsite sold to Burke & Farrar. The Lake Washington ship canal was finally completed. Kirk, grieving the death of his daughter in 1904, had moved to the family’s summer home on San Juan Island, where Kirk owned a large sheep ranch. He died at his home in Friday Harbor in 1916.

The Kirkland Steel Mill never produced a single ingot of steel. Yet its legacy endures. It shaped the early development of Kirkland, attracted settlers, and laid the groundwork for a community that would grow long after the mill’s foundations disappeared from view. It remains one of the Pacific Northwest’s most ambitious industrial dreams that, if achieved, would have fundamentally changed Kirkland as we know it today.