Early Kirkland

Kirkland is a city of over 88,000 today, but when the US government opened the eastern shore of Lake Washington for homesteading in 1870, it was an unforgiving, mostly unpopulated primeval forest of giant old-growth conifers and tangles of undergrowth. Over the next two decades, hardscrabble pioneers gradually braved the wilds to stake and prove up 80- and 160-acre land claims. In 1887, a consortium of speculators, developers, and dreamers headed by a dynamic English steel industrialist sou...