Cornwall - Powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution

The pumping machine made by Harvey's of Hayle

The Puffing Devil, built by Richard Trevithick

In my last blog I talked about the five children of John Stickland and Mary Rogers who were brought up by their grandparents after the untimely death of their parents, their father John in the May of 1773 and their mother Mary in the October of the same year.
Their grandparents Robert Stickland and Bridget Pryor resided in the tenement of Coswinsawsin, a tiny hamlet on the outskirts of the Cornish villiage of Gwinear, bordering onto Carnhel Green and Penponds.
At the time of their parents death the children were still quite young, Bridget the eldest was 8, John 7, Robert 5, David Rogers 4 and the youngest Mary was still a baby of 9 months when her mother died.
Grandfather Robert Strickland died two years later at the age of 65, he left a Last Will and Testament which enabled Bridget to carry on with the upbringing of her grandchildren. Interestingly one of the Executors of his Will was John Harvey, Blacksmith of Carnhel Green, who later went on to establish a Foundry in  Hayle ,"Harvey's of Hayle," which became famous supplying boilers and pumping machines throughout the world. The Haarlemmermeer in the Netherlands was drained by a famous pumping engine called Cruquious which was made at Harvey's and can still be visited and viewed today.
I assume that John Harvey and his children were close acquaintances to the Stickland family.
The three Stickland brothers probably attended school in Camborne and were most possibly acquainted with Richard Trevithick the famous Engineer and inventor. The  Tenement of Coswinsawsin were they lived is located only about 1 mile from the small hamlet of Penponds and the cottage where Richard Trevithick lived and grew up in. Richard Trevithick was born in 1771, so he would have been just two years younger than David Rogers Stickland, in fact there is a very big possibility that Richard would have known and socialised with the Stickland family, as he eventually married in 1797 with Jane Harvey the daughter of John Harvey who as I mentioned  was also a good acquaintance of the Sticklands.
An invention that the Stickland family are sure to have witnessed or at least heard about was Richard Trevithick’s steam powered road locomotive which he called ‘The puffing Devil’. On Christmas Eve 1801 Trevithick successfully demonstrated his locomotive by carrying several men up Camborne Hill, this locomotive was the forerunner to the steam train. A few days later during another test drive, the locomotive broke down, so Richard and his friends decided to leave it by the roadside whilst they refreshed themselves in a public house with a meal of roast goose and drinks. Meanwhile the water boiled off and the engine overheated and the whole carriage burnt out destroying it completely, luckily Richard didn’t consider this episode as a serious setback but more a case of operator error.
The last years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century were difficult times but also a time of great change and innovation, Cornwall became the centre of technological advance as inventors and engineers took up residence around the mines. Copper effectively made Cornwall the powerhouse of the English Industrial Revolution. Vast wealth was created by copper, merchants and bankers made fortunes, intelligent and able miners became mine captains and mine managers and everywhere the Cornish displayed enterprise and ingenuity unsurpassed anywhere in industrial history.
My Stickland ancestors were a part of this history, they witnessed the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Nowadays the village of Gwinear is so rural it is hard to imagine that so many mines were in operation and that thousands of people lived and worked in the area. Fortunes were made but they were also lost.