Kings Mills historical timeline

Kings Mills was built to make explosives at a safe distance from anywhere else.

The powder works

The King Powder Company moved here in the 1870s after an explosion at its previous site, choosing the secluded Little Miami River valley for the same reason. It built the works and a village to go with it, named for Ahimaaz King, and produced black powder and later a smokeless powder marketed as King’s Semi-Smokeless.

Peters Cartridge

The Peters Cartridge Company was founded alongside it in 1887 to load the powder into ammunition, and grew into one of the significant American ammunition makers. Its brick works expanded along the valley, with a distinctive tower used for shot-making, and it supplied both world wars, employing several thousand people at its wartime peak. Remington bought it in 1934 and closed the plant in 1944.

Explosions

Manufacturing explosives is dangerous work, and the site had a series of fatal accidents over its working life, which is part of why such plants were built in isolated valleys with separated buildings and earth barriers.

Kings Island

Coney Island, Cincinnati’s riverside amusement park, flooded repeatedly and had no room to grow, so its owners bought farmland here and opened Kings Island in 1972, moving several rides including a carousel.

Coney Island’s move

The park it replaced sat on the Ohio riverbank east of Cincinnati and flooded almost every spring, most severely in 1937 when the water reached the top of the rides. By the 1960s it was hemmed in and unable to expand, so its owners bought farmland here on high ground beside a new interstate, moved what could be moved — a 1926 carousel among it — and opened on the new site in 1972.

After

The factory stood derelict for decades, was cleaned up as a contaminated site, and has been converted into flats.