DURHAM COUNTY
LOCAL HISTORY SOCIETY

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All talks are at 2.00 pm on Saturday afternoons in St. Giles Church, Gilesgate, Durham.

Locomotion (the National Railway Museum at Shildon) will be holding a Local History Fair on Saturday November 21st at the railway museum in Shildon. Entry will be free, and rides on a stam train will be available at a small charge.

For at least a century and a half papermaking formed a significant part of the economy of County Durham, yet its existence has been largely ignored by industrial historians. The Lost Mills - A History of Papermaking in County Durham is the definitive study of all the known mills in the county from the first recorded example in the 1670s to the closure of the largest mill in the north of England in 1980.

With painstaking research using frequently fragmentary records, Jean V Stirk has pieced together the individual histories of 45 paper mills and set them in the context of both the changes in the regional economy and the wider history of the development of the papermaking industry in England. This is a pioneering study destined to put a long neglected industry back on the historical map of the county.

The author Jean V Stirk wrote her doctoral thesis on industrial relations in a craft trade based on previously lost records of the Original Society of Papermakers 1800-1948 that she located in private hands. Now a freelance lecturer in aspects of local, industrial and family history, she is also Editor of the British Association of Paper Historians News and a member of Durham County Local History Society.

This publication is available from the Publications' Secretary.
Professor G. Batho
History of Education Project
The Miners' Hall
Red Hills
Durham City
DH1 4BB

Telephone: 0191 3709941

e-mail our Publications Officer

This page will be regularly updated to provide the latest news about the society and to record changes and additions to these pages. We hope that it will be of particular use to those who regularly return to this site.

The information on this site will tell you more about what we do, our open meetings and our publications. Information is also provided about membership of the Society.