Kings Mills Culture

Kings Mills has the culture of a company village and the noise of a theme park.

The company town

King Powder and Peters Cartridge built housing, a school, a church and a company store, and ran the village as an extension of the works. The pattern was common in American industry and was paternalistic by design: good housing kept a skilled and careful workforce in a business where carelessness killed people. The historic district preserves the layout, and local historical societies have documented it closely.

Kings Island as institution

For south-west Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, the park is a rite of passage rather than a day out: generations have had school trips, first jobs and first dates there. Its Eiffel Tower replica, visible from the interstate, functions as a regional landmark, and the wooden coaster called The Beast, opened in 1979 and still the longest wooden coaster in the world, has a genuine following.

The river

Canoeing the Little Miami River is a long-established regional summer habit, with liveries running trips of a few hours to a few days.

Filmed here

The park has appeared on national television a number of times, most memorably in a 1970s sitcom episode filmed on location, which is the sort of thing a region remembers about a place it already treats as a landmark.

Fort Ancient

A few miles upriver stands one of the largest prehistoric hilltop earthwork enclosures in North America: around five and a half kilometres of embankment following the edge of a bluff above the Little Miami River, built by the Hopewell culture roughly two thousand years ago, with gateways aligned to solar and lunar events. It is a world heritage site and a reminder that this valley was significant long before anyone made gunpowder in it.