Great Britain -- Description and travel; Railroad travel -- Great Britain; Railroads -- Great Britain
HUDDERSFIELD, twenty-six miles from Manchester, is the first important town,
on a road studded with stations, from which busy weavers and spinners are
continually passing and repassing. It is situated in a naturally barren
district, where previously to 1811 the inhabitants chiefly lived on oaten
cake, and has been raised to a high degree of prosperity by the extension of
the manufactures, a position on the high road between Manchester and Leeds,
intersected by a canal, uniting the east and west, or inland navigation, and
more recently by railroads, which connect it with all the manufacturing towns
of the north. An ample supply of water-power, with coal and building stone,
have contributed to this prosperity, of which advantage has been taken to
improve the streets, thoroughfares, and public buildings. The use of a light
yellow building stone for the houses has a very pleasant appearance after the
bricks of Manchester and Liverpool.
The Huddersfield Canal, which connects the Humber and Mersey, is a very
extraordinary piece of work. It is carried through and over a backbone of
hills by stairs of more than thirty locks in nine miles, and a tunnel three
miles in length. At one place it is 222 yards below the surface, and at
another 656.5 feet above the level of the sea.
When we examine such works, so profitable to the community, so unprofitable
to the projectors, how can we doubt the capability of our country to hold its
own in any commercial race? Men make a country, not accidents of soil or
climate, mines or forests. For centuries California and Central America have
been in the hands of an Iberian race, fallow. A few months of Anglo-Saxon
rule, and land and sea are boiling with fervid elements of cultivation,
commerce, and civilization. With time the dregs will disappear, and churches
and schools, cornfields and fulling-mills, will supersede grizzly bears and
wandering Indians.
All the land in Huddersfield belongs to the Ramsden family, by whom the Cloth
Hall was erected. Six hundred manufacturers attend this hall every Tuesday.
The principal manufactures are of broad and narrow cloths, serges,
kerseymeres, cords, and fancy goods of shawls and waistcoatings, composed of
mixed cotton, silk, and wool.
The neighbourhood of Huddersfield was the centre of the Luddite outbreak,
when a large number of persons engaged in the cloth manufacture, conceiving
that they were injured by the use of certain inventions for dressing cloth,
banded together, traversed the country at night, searching for and carrying
off fire-arms, and attacking and destroying the manufactories of persons
supposed to use the obnoxious machines.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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