Plaques unveiled at city's mill sites help to keep Newry's history alive

Newry's mill history was celebrated on Thursday past, 25 June with the addition of commemorative plaques at Clanrye Mills/ Sands' Mill and Newry Cathedral garden.

The event organised by the Old Newry Society and the Sinclair Trust  recalled the importance of Sands' Mill and its continuing use as Newry's only surviving working mill by Fane Valley. It also recalled the former site of Newry Mills on the site of Newry Cathedral Garden which was burnt to the ground in 1910, claiming the life of firefighter James Fegan.

One of the event organisers Peter Sinclair from the Sinclair Trust spoke of the Sinclair connection. "William Sinclair died in 1880. His son, Abraham Walker Sinclair, continued the milling here [Sands' Mill], It was auctioned off in 1894 but things were very tough, 1880s, 1890s, all the flour flooding in from North America, and so on, so they found it very difficult to survive." 

Sinclair spoke of how important it is to remember our past “It's important for residents in Newry to know about their heritage, know about their past, and how important it was, how important the mills were. There were eight flour mills, not linen mills - eight flour mills in Newry during the 19th century, and the Clanrye Mills is the only one that's still working." Speaking about Newry Mills which was situated where the cathedral garden is now, he added "This is particularly important because in 1910 this burned down and it was never rebuilt."

Tom Moore, Old Newry Society added: “For the old Newry Society, the importance of today's event is to remember two things: remember the history of the flour mills in this town, which were big as part of Newry's industry long before Belfast was the industrial city that it is, and then sadly we're also remembering James Fagan, a firefighter who was killed fighting this fire. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find any of James's descendants because we would have loved to have had them present, and on that account we laid a wreath on James's grave this morning up in St Patrick’s graveyard“

The first plaque of the day was placed at the side of Sands' Mill, owned by Fane Valley since the early 1980's. A flour mill has been on the site for over 170 years and the company currently manufacture animal feedstuff there. Speaking before the plaque was unveiled Patrick Savage, Chairman of Fane Valley thanked Peter Sinclair and the Old Newry Society for all their work. He  added: "We are indebted to all those who had the vision to embrace progress and change in order to provide a service for farmers, and indeed all who used what was produced in here.

Can I assure all that Fane Valley plans to build on the excellent foundations that were established, and It's now a crucial part of our Agri Advanced Programme. I'll not bore you with the details of that, but basically it involves making feed for cattle using the most up to date state of the art technologies, which obviously everybody right along the line had to do in their day, and we're continuing to do that and building on it every year. Our vision is to make what is produced here a product of excellence. This will be the ultimate guarantee of the future of this mill."

He added: " I wish to thank all who have contributed to the success of this mill from its beginnings to the present day, because obviously there's a lot of links in the chain there. If any of those links hadn't happened, then we wouldn't be here today."

The day could not have been better and under a deep blue sky the plaque was unveiled by Sinclair to applause from those in attendance.

The event at Sands' Mill was followed by the placing of 2 plaques at Newry Cathedral garden, one to recall the mill that existed on the site and the second to pay tribute to the fireman who lost his life while fighting a fire at the mill in 1910.

The plaque explains that two water mills were situated on the site in 1588 and that for the next 322 years an oat mill and flour mill were powered by a mill race flowing down what later became Water Street!

Peter Sinclair has produced a book entitled Corn and Flour Milling in Newry. You can find out more about it at sinclairgenealogy.info