How Was Kings Mills Built

Almost everything in Kings Mills was built by one company for one purpose.

The Peters Cartridge works

A long range of brick industrial buildings strung along the valley floor beside the railway, several storeys high, with segmental-arched windows and a tall square shot tower — molten lead was dropped down it into water, forming spheres on the way. The complex is on the National Register of Historic Places and, after a long remediation of lead and other contamination, has been converted into apartments with much of the external fabric retained. Explosives plants were laid out deliberately: buildings separated by distance and earth banks, so that an accident in one did not take the rest.

The village

Company housing climbs the valley side above the works — modest timber and brick houses on a grid adapted to the slope — with the larger houses of managers on the better ground and the school and church among them.

The trail

The rail-trail through the village runs on the alignment of the railway that served the factory.

Adaptive reuse

The conversion of the cartridge works into housing is a substantial piece of industrial reuse: the floor plates, window openings and the tower were retained, while the contaminated soil around them was removed under federal supervision. It is the reason the most striking building in the village still stands rather than having been cleared.

Kings Island

An amusement park laid out on the theme-park model of the 1970s: a central axis leading to a landmark — here a third-scale Eiffel Tower — with themed areas off it.