A HISTORY OF ECCLESFIELD PARISH - Page 4

Compiled by Joan & Mel Jones of Chapeltown & High Green Archive

Before industrialization in the nineteenth century, Chapeltown was a hamlet that had developed around the crossroads where the Sheffield to Barnsley road crossed the Rotherham to Wortley road, and where a number of inns and small businesses were located. To the south of the hamlet was a small open field system. The hamlet was also beside Blackburn Brook which powered a corn mill near Cowley Manor and, from the late sixteenth century, the Chapel Furnace next to White Lane to the north of the settlement. This blast furnace was powered by charcoal from the surrounding woods until about 1780: after that date until about 1860 it operated as a coke-fuelled furnace and the tenants had associated coal and ironstone pits.

However, by the end of the eighteenth century, Chapel Furnace was rivalled by a new industrial development less than a mile further up the Blackburn valley, which would overshadow much of the economic activity in the immediate vicinity and would provide employment not only for the population in Chapeltown and High Green, but also in Ecclesfield and Grenoside and beyond. This was the Thorncliffe Ironworks of Newton Chambers. The first lease of land from Earl Fitzwilliam of nearby Wentworth Woodhouse was in 1793. From a small staff of about a dozen at the beginning of 1794, there were about 300 in 1800 and nearly 8,000 a century later. The company mined its own ironstone around the works until 1880 and its own coal until the creation of the National Coal Board in 1947. At first the firm manufactured small cast iron goods, but by 1815 was also producing heavy castings and beginning to specialise in gas lighting plant and later gasworks plant. From 1935 the firm also produced excavators and in 1958 bought Ransome and Rapiers of Ipswich and thereby doubled the firm’s excavator production capacity. During the Second World War 1,160 Churchill tanks were made in the excavator factory.

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