History of Hilden
A brief history
Hilden is a village on the outskirts of Lisburn in the parish of Lambeg. Of its early history little is known. In the seventeenth century settlers, mainly from England, moved to the Lisburn area. A map from the 1650s shows ‘Landbeg Towne’ with its ironworks by the Lagan. Hilden became a site of some importance in 1701 when Louis Crommelin established here what is said to have been the first mass bleaching establishment in Ireland. Crommelin was the leader of the French Huguenot community which settled in the Lisburn area from the late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century another Huguenot, Samuel Delacherois, made Hilden his family home and operated a bleach green there.
The family most associated with Hilden were the Barbours. Originating in Scotland, the Barbours moved to the Lisburn area in the late eighteenth century and established a thread factory at The Plantation. In 1824 William Barbour bought the former beach green at Hilden and built a thread factory. Barbour’s industrial venture prospered and by the 1830s Hilden was described as the ‘seat of the most extensive thread factory in Ireland’. The factory buildings were described as follows:
The stove house and water mill stands 3-storeys high, the boiling house, office and yarn stores 2-storeys high. All other houses occupied in the business is [sic] 1-storey high and the entire building slated.
The factory was then engaged in preparing, bleaching and dyeing yarn for different types of thread. Over 300 people were employed here, both men and women and from all age groups. Near the factory Barbour had built twenty houses to accommodate employees and their families. When William Barbour arrived in Hilden he found the old home of the Delacherois family in a dilapidated state. He, therefore, built a new house, the present Hilden House. Hilden House and its grounds were described in 1837 in the Ordnance Survey Memoir of the parish of Lambeg in the following terms:
The house is a very commodious, square building, 2 storeys high and slated. The yards are well enclosed, the offices extensive, all slated and chiefly 2 storeys high. The garden, containing about 2 English acres, is enclosed by a stone and lime wall about 12 feet high and well stocked with fruit trees. It is tastefully laid off in every particular and contains a handsome glass-roofed greenhouse, where good grape and a variety of cape flowers are annually reared and other glasshouses or hot beds for melons. It also contains a sundial, a good garden house, a good metal pump and water engine for watering the garden.
The business expanded rapidly and according to Bassett’s 1888 directory of County Antrim William Barbour & Sons was deservedly ‘ranked as the largest manufacturers in the world of tailors’ thread and shoemakers’ thread for hand and machine sewing’. By this time there were 300 houses for workers which were described as ‘neatly kept’. In 1875 a school was opened inside the Barbour factory which provided both religious and secular education for the families of both mill employers and employees. The present school – a listed building – was built in 1913. In November 1932 the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) visited Hilden Mill, generating much excitement. Today there is little indication of the industrial activity of the scale of past times. Changes in the world textile industry have had a devastating effect on local firms. The factory at Hilden closed very recently, its workforce having been latterly reduced to less than 100. Linen manufacturing no longer continues in the village, unfortunately this ceased to trade in July 2006, however Hilden has a new trade with the establishment of Hilden Brewery in 1981.
Many thanks to William Roulston of the Ulster Historical Foundation for writing this for us.
