Kings Landing Historical Settlement was created in response to a twentieth-century project that threatened to erase part of New Brunswick's rural past. During the 1960s the construction of the Mactaquac Dam on the Saint John River created a large headpond west of Fredericton. Farms, houses, churches, shops, and entire communities lay within the area to be flooded or reshaped. Provincial officials established a historical resources program in 1967 to document the threatened landscape, collect artifacts, and save representative buildings. Structures were carefully dismantled or moved from the river valley and reassembled at a new site near Prince William.

Kings Landing was never a single historic village. It was deliberately composed from buildings with different origins so that the settlement could tell a broader story of rural New Brunswick between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The oldest narratives begin with the Wolastoqey homeland along the river and the arrival of settlers from varied backgrounds. After the American Revolution, Loyalist refugees entered New Brunswick, joined by earlier inhabitants and later Scottish, Irish, and English immigrants. Farms, churches, schools, workshops, and stores illustrate how these communities adapted to the river valley and developed local networks of labor, worship, education, and exchange.

The recreated village also interprets major changes that unfolded across the province. Household production existed alongside water-powered mills and specialized trades. Blacksmiths, carpenters, printers, merchants, and innkeepers served a dispersed farming population. New tools and factory-made goods altered work, while roads, steamboats, railways, and communications connected rural families to wider markets. Political interpretation has included debates over Canadian Confederation, allowing visitors to encounter the arguments that surrounded New Brunswick's entry into the new Dominion in 1867 rather than treating Confederation as inevitable.

The site opened informally in 1971 and officially on 20 July 1974. Costumed interpreters did more than display furnished rooms: they cultivated fields and gardens, tended livestock, cooked over hearths, demonstrated crafts, and presented the choices faced by people in particular historical years. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited in 1976, giving the young institution national visibility. The collection continued to grow as additional endangered buildings and artifacts were acquired. Today the grounds contain dozens of historic and reconstructed structures and a collection numbering many thousands of objects.

Kings Landing's own history reflects changing museum practice. Early presentations often emphasized picturesque Loyalist settlement and traditional crafts. Later interpretation broadened to address Indigenous presence, social class, migration, women's labor, religion, industrialization, and the complicated human costs of development projects such as Mactaquac. The museum preserves material rescued from the headpond, but it also preserves memories of communities whose physical settings were altered or submerged. Its most important historical event was therefore its creation: an emergency salvage campaign became a living museum where displaced buildings were reorganized to tell two centuries of New Brunswick history. The project was also shaped by the politics of historical memory. Buildings selected for relocation represented particular rural experiences, while interpreters later broadened the story to address women's work, Indigenous relationships, class, religion, migration, and environmental change. Kings Landing thus records both nineteenth-century life and changing approaches to public history.