Great Western Iron and Steel Company
American company
The Great Western Iron and Steel Company was a company founded in the 1890s in Kirkland, Washington Territory by the city's namesake Peter Kirk to build an integrated smelter and steel mill to refine local ore into steel for rails and other purposes. If the enterprise had proceeded as Kirk and other investors envisioned, it would have held a "practical monopoly of the entire Pacific Coast" steel production. But instead, the company went bankrupt in the Panic of 1893, and the mostly-completed mill never produced any steel. A scholar in 1962 called it "the last major effort of private capital to erect an integrated iron and steel mill on the West Coast".
Rise and fall of Great Western Iron and Steel
Kirk was a steel industry veteran from England. He and his business partners (including Member of Parliament Charles James Valentine) owned the Moss Bay Hematite Iron Company, later renamed Moss Bay Hematite Iron and Steel Company Limited, at Mossbay in Workington, Cumberland.
In Washington Territory, iron ore had been discovered near Snoqualmie Pass by Seattle pioneer Arthur A. Denny and coalfields were being worked in the Issaquah Alps and elsewhere in the King County Cascades foothills, although metallurgical coal used on the West Coast in the 1880s was imported from Australia.
Kirk became aware of the mineral resources and local demand on a trip to the area in 1886, during which year his British company supplied rails for the construction of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway. By 1887 thousands of tons of rails were being shipped from Britain, and a newspaper reported Kirk's company would begin production in King County within two years. Tacoma newspapers reported in early May, 1888 that Northern Pacific Railway's land agent Paul Schulze had wooed the project to begin in Cle Elum, Washington, but in late May, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported it was going to be done "between Houghton and Juanita" (now neighborhoods of Kirkland, then independent towns, and Kirkland was yet to receive its name).
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Western Iron and Steel Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.