Dead men may tell no tales at the Kirkland Cemetery. Thankfully for Kirklanders, local historian Matthew McCauley is more than eager to regale them with incredible stories from their city’s past.

During a recent tour of the Kirkland Cemetery, McCauley, a long-time Kirkland resident and author, gave Kirklanders the chance to hear of the good, the bad, the ugly and the baffling times in a city first occupied by homesteaders and later flooded by financial investors.

“It went really well,” he said. “The energy was just awesome.”

The tour is part of the Kirkland Historical Foundation’s desire for greater public outreach, according to McCauley, who also hopes to continue offering them on an annual basis. The idea was first suggested by Parks Board member Sue Contreras, McCauley said, until he “finally ran out of excuses and said ‘We’ve got to get this going.’”

“She was definitely the moving force behind this thing,” McCauley said.

The Kirkland Cemetery, which McCauley said is the oldest park in the city, seems an appropriate place to help educate residents about their local history as many are unaware of its existence. This includes Lake Washington High School students and alumni, despite the school being located across the street.

“To walk through the Kirkland Cemetery is to take a stroll through Kirkland’s history,” he said.

The location of the cemetery, now in the center of the city, indicates how much Kirkland’s face has changed since Peter Kirk first created the town plat in 1890. When the cemetery was first built, it was deliberately placed away from where they intended for the town to be located. Originally part of a homestead, the family who owned it eventually sold it to the Kirkland Land and Improvement Company owned by Peter Kirk, who was also involved in steel works.

“At the time the cemetery was way out in the boondocks,” McCauley said. “The original town plat was west of the Cross Kirkland Corridor. To get to the middle of Forbes Lake and the cemetery, it was out in the tules. They didn’t want to put the cemetery in too close.”

It is also where many early Kirkland settlers, including Civil War veterans, Scandinavian immigrants and steamboat builders, who remained after plans to create an industrial region failed following the Panic of 1893. Their personal stories helped shape the city one way or another. The stories are also not confined to a specific group or section of Kirkland. Many, if not all, of the city’s neighborhoods are represented, according to McCauley.

“It’s the real bread and butter kind of people,” he said.

The stories range from tragic and inspiring to incredulous and criminal, such as one concerning a family that settled in the Highlands Neighborhood in 1882. Out of their four children, three of them died in three days from diphtheria, leaving only an infant. However, the mother refused to abandon the homestead. According to McCauley, the infant grew up to marry Kirkland’s first treasurer.

Another impressive anecdote is that of a widow who acted as the custodian, bus driver, and president of the school board for Juanita School District 21.

However, the most astonishing thing people may find on the tour, McCauley said, is how radically different Kirkland is from what the originally vision in the late 1880s. Then, plans were being made to build industrial steel mills, and speculators and investors from Seattle were buying up land from homesteaders in anticipation. The scene extended out to politics, with politicians being pressured to get a shipyard built along the waterfront, according to McCauley.

“This place could have been an HBO miniseries,” McCauley said. “There was that much drama here.”

When the Panic of 1893 occurred, however, the land speculation collapsed, and the plans for a steel mill were scrapped. By 1894, it had almost been reduced to a ghost town. Had the plans gone forward and a steel mill built on Forbes Lake, the local culture and community would have been primarily industrial-centered, akin to Pittsburgh.

“It would have been a sledge pit, big smoke stacks, soot,” he said. “… we’re really lucky it never actually went through.”

It is aspects of history like this that McCauley believes are not only critical to understanding how the city developed, but is also what captures residents’ interest.

“Looking at the city now with the beautiful waterfront parks you would never know it had this kind of an origin,” he said. “They (residents) drive by brick buildings on Market Street and don’t know…it was going to be the nerve center of this empire.”

Many residents walking down Kirkland Avenue and Lake Street might not know of a murder that took place on those streets in the 1930s, or that the killer walked away scot-free. Harry H. Loy, who worked at the local drug store located at the corner, suspected Louis “Louie” Todd, owner of the Todd Feed Store on Park Lane, of having an affair with his wife. When Todd was seen on the street, the jealous husband confronted him and got into an argument. Despite Todd adamantly denying anything was going on, Loy pulled out a gun and shot him dead.

“It was a scandalous tabloid story of the day,” McCauley said. “Everybody was just riveted.”

Although Loy was disarmed by the town marshal, arrested and charged for the murder in a King County court, when the case finally went to trial, the jury shared his suspicions. Enough doubt was cast on the possibility of an affair, McCauley said, the jury acquitted him.

“They simply felt adultery had been present,” he said. “That’s how far we’ve come since 1930…That put Kirkland on the map in terms of scandals in the early 20th century.”

To this day, Todd’s grave remains unmarked in the cemetery, though cemetery documents and some careful probing helped reveal its location. McCauley said they hope to put donations from the tour towards getting a grave marker for Todd’s final resting place.

For McCauley, his own childhood in the Juanita neighborhood, which was then unincorporated, consisted of stories of Kirkland’s past from neighbors who had married in 1919 and could recall taking the ferry on Lake Washington, or how their family had arrived in the 1890s to work at the steel mill.

“I was hearing a lot of these stories as a kid and it was very intriguing to me,” he said.

While McCauley himself didn’t spend his entire childhood in Kirkland, moving to Mercer Island after the sixth grade, he said his family ties have always been in the community.

“It’s literally been a lifelong interest,” he said.

In the early 1990s, McCauley wrote columns about Kirkland’s history for the Kirkland Courier, which ran from 1978 to 2008, when it was renamed Kirkland Reporter. Many of the columns were collected and published in a book, Ode to the Past Kirkland, which includes an interview with the granddaughter of Diane Forbes, whose family founded Juanita and Forbes Lake. He has a second book set to come out, “Early Kirkland,” which covers the city’s history from the Ice Age to the 1950s.

“I think that ultimately Kirkland is so much more than some kind of a cookie cutter suburb,” McCauley said. “The eyes of the world were literally on it in the late 1880s and 1890s.”

Arline Ely also published a book on Kirkland’s history called “Our Founding Fathers.”

To learn more, go to kirklandhistory.org.