Helmshore Mills Textile Museum

Helmshore Mills Textile Museum

Helmshore Mills Textile Museum
Location within the Borough of Rossendale
Cotton Wool
Alternative names	Higher Mill, Whitakerś Mill
Spinning mills
Architectural style	Stone built 3 storey
Structural system	Stone
Owner	William Turner
Current owners	Lancashire Museums
Coordinates	53°41′20″N 2°20′10″W / 53.6890°N 2.3362°W / 53.6890; -2.3362
Construction
Built	1789
Floor count	3
Water Power
Wheels	2 Pitch back
Equipment
Cotton count	20
Mule Frames	4 per floor, Taylor, Lang &^Co Ltd, Stalybridge
Doublers	1

The condenser spinning process (1920)

	Hard Waste		Soft Waste		Comber waste	-
	Jumbo		Single cylinder devil		Hopper opener		Blowing Room
	Six cylinder devil
	Breaker Scutcher
			Lap (Scutcher lap)		42lbs a time
	Breaker Carding						Carding Room
			Sliver
	Derby Doubler				Takes 88 slivers
			Lap (Sliver lap)
	Finisher Carding
			Roving		On bobbins or a beam
	Drawing
	Mule Spinning
	Yarn

Helmshore Mills are two mills built on the River Ogden in Helmshore, Lancashire. Higher Mill was built in 1796 for William Turner, and Whitaker's Mill was built in the 1820s by the Turner family. In their early life they alternated between working wool and cotton. By 1920 they were working shoddy as condensor mule mills; and equipment has been preserved and is still used. The mills closed in 1967 and they were taken over by the Higher Mills Trust, whose trustees included Chris Aspin, the historian and author and Dr Rhodes Boyson who maintained it as a museum. The museum is open for visitors and does carding and mule spinning demonstrations. The mills are certainly the most original and best preserved examples of both Cotton Spinning and Woollen Fulling left in the country which are still operational.

Following the withdrawal of its grant from Lancashire County Council this museum will be closed to the public on 30 September 2016 for an undetermined period.

Helmshore Mills lies within Helmshore, a village in the Rossendale Valley, Lancashire, England. It is situated 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Haslingden, broadly between the A56 and the B6235, approximately 16 miles (26 km) north of Manchester, and 3 miles (4.8 km) from the M65 motorway. Helmshore straddles the River Ogden a tributary of the River Irwell. The village developed around the 7 cotton and wool mills.

Before the mills were built, the Turner family had been involved in textiles. Three of the six brothers made their living from wool in Martholme and three from cotton in Blackburn. In 1789 the brothers built Higher Mill on a green field site in the parish of Musbury as a woollen fulling mill but the cotton brothers soon dropped out of the enterprise. It was the son of one of these original six, a William Turner (1793–1852) who built the larger Wool Spinning mill in the 1820s. This was a wool carding and spinning. It then would have gone to Middle mill on Holcombe Rd for Weaving then would have return to Higher mill for Fulling and Finishing. Turner instructed in his will that the mill should be sold on his death, which occurred in 1852. This Mill was destroyed by fire in 1857, and was rebuilt in 1860 by Edward Turner. At Somepoint after the end of the American Civil War and return of Cotton to Lancashire that the rebuilt mill started Cotton Spinning. In the 1920s, the mill was bought by L.Whitaker & Sons who installed cotton condensing equipment and the mill continued in that business until November 1978. Higher Mill came to be operated by Lawrence Whittaker in 1875 still using Turners machinery, and his descendants continued to run it as a fulling mill until June 1967. The two families may have been distantly related but by the 1920s the Whittakers were a well known local family while the L.Whitaker & Sons group no longer had any Whitakers working for them and were owned and run by the Hardman Family. The freehold of both mills in the Helmshore Mills Estate was bought by Lawrence Whittakers family.