THE MILL TOWNS OF N.E. CHESHIRE
Modern science has found better and easier ways of making salt. The white salt which you use daily is still obtained by evaporation. The brine is first pumped into a reservoir and taken by pipes to large shallow salt-pans heated by furnaces beneath them. As the water evaporates the crystals are formed and scraped from the sides and the bottoms of the pans. You may see specimens of the different kinds of salt in the Salt Museum at Northwich.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION. II
In the year 1785 cotton was brought into the Mersey from the United States of America. Long before that time so-called 'cotton' stuffs had been made in Cheshire villages. But these fabrics were not really cotton at all, but a mixture of wool and flax. The flax was brought from Ireland, and woollen manufacturers tried for a long time to keep it out. In the parish records of Prestbury you may read of an Act passed in Charles the Second's reign forbidding any one to be buried in anything but a woollen shroud.
At first there were no cotton-mills, such as you see now in the populous towns of East Cheshire. The raw cotton was given out to poor people, who spun it and wove it in their own cottage homes. Nearly every cottage became a small factory, the fathers, mothers, and children all taking part in the work. The machinery was simple and made of wood. The spinning was done by the women and children in the house, the weaving by the men in a weaving-shed of one story built in the yard.
As time went on, the machinery was improved by the inventions of clever men, so that one loom would do as much work as several had done previously. The workpeople did not like the new machines, for often a number of people were thrown out of work by them, and frequently the new spinning and weaving-frames of the inventors were wrecked by a furious mob.
The earlier and simpler machines, such as the spinning-wheel and the hand-loom, were worked by hand. But the new discoveries made it possible for one wheel to turn eighty or a hundred spindles at once by means of horse-power or a water-wheel, and the hand-loom similarly gave place to a power-loom. But in remote villages the old-fashioned methods survived, and even to this day you may still occasionally see a hand-loom at work in cottages in the highlands of East Cheshire.
Then great factories began to be built, huge buildings of brick and of many stories, chiefly on the banks of Cheshire streams, or on the canals, by which the raw cotton could be brought in barges to the very doors. You may look down from the churchyard of Mottram into the valley beneath and count a score of them. Steam was applied, and the whole of the machinery of the factories was driven by this new force. Great towns sprang up like mushrooms. Hyde and Stalybridge and Dukinfield, from being tiny villages, soon became great busy hives of the cotton industry.