This one happened by accident...I happened to be down at the beautiful Irondale County Beach Park with my kids and just decided to poke around the Bert Kellogg collection for photos from Irondale. I had no idea that this was the site of one of the first major industrial endeavors in Western Washington, the Irondale Iron and Steel Plant built in 1881. This photo from sometime around the turn of the 20th century gives a sense for the scale of the site:
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| Turn of the century photo of the Irondale Iron and Steel Mill, taken from about here. Photo from the Bert Kellogg collection. |
The modern view (or as close to it as I could figure out how to get):
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| 5 July 2021 photo taken here. |
At low tide various pilings and cement footings are still visible on the beach here, presumably that were associated with the buildings and wharfs of the mill. And while I didn't explore more of the site, it looks as if there might be a lot of history still visible in the trees if you poke around. In the distance in both the historic and modern photo is Kala Point, with an apparently nearly identical copse of trees visible in both photos, and then behind that the shoreline of Port Townsend.
