THEN AND NOW: Peter Kirk's Never-Used Steel Mill

THIS AMAZING photo believed taken in 1891 and looking east at Peter Kirk’s Great Western Iron and Steel Works on Rose Hill is almost unfathomable today because the vicinity has changed so much.

Although we hear traces of the mill can still be found, we sure haven’t seen any. Loita Hawkinson, president of the Kirkland Heritage Society, tells us the mill was farther north than we always believed, on the east side of Forbes Lake – or as old-timers call it, Little Lake, or Little Lake Kirkland.

The long building on the left was built to serve as the mill’s bunkers, and ran parallel to today’s 124 Avenue NE. Except that they were never used.

We will not entertain discussion here of why the mill never turned iron ore into steel, because the topic remains one of debate today, some 120 years later.

Let’s just say that as fate, fortune and the vagaries of business would have it, the namesake of the City of Kirkland never realized his dream of turning the area into a burgeoning Pittsburgh of the West.

The photo may show the Kirk family; no one ever positively identified them as such, but it has always been assumed they were the Kirks.

Forbes Lake would have been to the left and behind the cameraman.

As a kid and young man, friends and I would sometimes fish and swim in the lake. It is known that an early settler drowned in the lake long ago. But the legend we always repeated was that the unfortunate soul’s body only surfaced much later – in Lake Washington!

I guess the notion of a subterranean connection between the two was too much to resist for the imagination of youth – patently untrue no doubt.

Long-range plans by the Kirkland Department of Parks and Community Services call for a boardwalk and trail to be built in this area, on the east and southeast sides of the lake.

But if it is built, those who walk it will just have to imagine this compelling scene from Kirkland’s past.