Kings Mills
Discover Kings Mills
A concise introduction to Kings Mills, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Kings Mills is a small community in Warren County, between Cincinnati and Dayton, and it exists because of gunpowder. The King’s Great Western Powder Company moved here in the 1870s and built the village for its workers, and the Peters Cartridge Company that followed made ammunition on the site through both world wars. The brick Peters Cartridge tower still stands above the Little Miami river, a listed landmark that spent decades derelict and has now been converted into apartments.
The reason most people come is next door. Kings Island is one of the largest amusement parks in the United States, opened in 1972, with a third-scale Eiffel Tower at the end of its main street and The Beast — the longest wooden roller coaster in the world, running for more than two kilometres through the woods behind the park, and still, more than forty years after it was built, the ride people come for.
The Little Miami is a state and national scenic river, and the paved trail along it runs for more than a hundred kilometres through the valley, passing the village directly — which makes this an unusually good base for cycling as well as for the park. Kings Mills is about twenty-five minutes from downtown Cincinnati.