The Kirkland Cannery Building, also once called King County Food Processing Plant and State Cannery Number 4, is a historic building in

Kirkland, Washington Kirkland is a city in King County, Washington, United States. A suburb east of Seattle, its population was 92,175 in the 2020 U.S. census which made it the sixth largest city in the county and the twelfth largest in the state. The city's downto ...

. It is an 11,000 ft² cannery, built in 1936 by President Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA), and was sold to the City of Kirkland in 1941 for $44.79. It was operated as a cooperative to benefit the poor during the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

, along with three other WPA plants at Kent, Wapato, and Wenatchee. Citizens could bring in crops, fish, and chicken, to be canned at no charge in exchange for donating one third of the product to "state institutions". During World War II, it "was largely as an aid to the general food conservation program and the war effort rather than as an economic aid to the communities served". Around this time, it produced a peak of 400,000 cans of food per season. After the war it was leased to local businesspeople and used for private concerns, then sold to them in 1974. They operated the Kirkland Custom Seafood business, using the cannery building as a smokehouse for Aldercove brand smoked salmon, processing 350,000 pounds of salmon there in 2000, the year before it closed. Around 2006, the city was looking for a new owner to preserve the building, and in late 2014, the cannery building was sold to local resident and Philanthropist Carl Bradley who will preserve and restore the Cannery, returning it back to serve the community once again.

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*{{Commons category-inline, Kirkland Cannery *Images at University of Washington Digital Collections
Exterior, 1939

Interior, 1939
City of Kirkland, May 26, 2009 1936 establishments in Washington (state) Buildings and structures in Kirkland, Washington Canneries History of Kirkland, Washington Works Progress Administration in Washington (state)