Edgar
Street still exists running parallel to the bottom of Derby Street before coming
to a halt at Aldi’s car park. These days it is nothing more than a glorified
back street with the rear of the shops on Derby Street on one side of the
street and mill buildings on the other side, but from the middle of the
nineteenth century until the 1920s there was a small community of people in
Edgar Street along with nearby Closes Street and Carey Street.
The
Cotton Tree was at number 9-11 Edgar Street and next door at number 13 was the
engineering works of Thomas Mitchell and Sons Ltd. The firm was founded in 1838
and dealt in new and reconditioned machinery mainly for the cotton industry.
[1]
Like
many beerhouses, the Cotton Tree seems to have started life as a shop. Its
first mention is on the 1861 census when James Moore, a 60-year-old beerseller
and shopkeeper is running the premises. Mr Moore in on the 1841 census as a
cotton spinner living in Coe Street, off Bridgeman Street, so that could give
us a clue as to how the pub got its name. There were couple of other pubs by that
name in Bolton in the 1860s: one on Moor Lane and one on Lever Street.
James
Moore was assisted by John Hargreaves and it seems the Hargreaves family
eventually took over the pub. Peter Hargreaves appears as landlord on the 1869
Directory while John Hargreaves is in charge from 1871 onwards.
By
1895, the Cotton Tree was being run by the 24-year-old James Thornley whose
father John Thornley was the landlord of the Flag Inn on Great Moor Street. He
didn’t last long and by the time he married in 1901 he was working as a pattern
maker on Bridge Street.
The
Cotton Tree was owned by the Mort family in the last years of its existence.
[2] It was leased to Wingfield’s Silverwell Brewery and that would have been no
later than the end of the nineteenth century as Manchester Brewery Company took
over Wingfield’s in 1899. It was a Manchester Brewery pub when it closed in
1908. William Lord was its final landlord. After closure the pub was converted
into a private residence.
Many
of the houses in Edgar Street, including the Cotton Tree, were demolished in
the early-thirties. One of residents in the area was local historian the late Norman
Kenyon who describes the houses on Edgar Street thus:
“The
property in Edgar Street was very old and behind our cottage in a narrow alley,
six or seven feet wide, was the communal lavatory. This was kept clean in turn
by the ladies living in the row. Each lady carried out her task dutifully….The
cottage in Edgar Street was a blessing in one sense, for we lived there at a
time when Bolton Council was embarking on Clearance Orders to get rid of our
old property and was building new housing estate such as Platt Hill and Willows
Lane.”
Bolton,
Daubhill and Deane. A Sentimental Journey, by Norman Kenyon. Published by Neil
Richardson (1998).
The
Kenyons headed off to Malton Avenue, off Hulton Lane in the early-1930s and the
former Cotton Tree building was demolished along with the rest of its row and
much of the surrounding street. The only building to remain was number 13,
Mitchell’s offices. The factory was also spared.
Mitchell’s
built a garage on the land occupied by some of the demolished properties. With
a diminishing market for reconditioned machines and no younger family members willing
to carry on the business after four generations Mitchell’s went into Members
Voluntary Liquidation in 2007. An image of the factory taken in 2006 can be
seen on this page.
The
car park at the Aldi Store at the bottom of Derby Street pictured in 2012
(copyright Google Street View). A truncated Edgar Street can be seen on the
right hand side of the picture. Mitchell’s factory was situated directly in
front of us and the site of the Cotton Tree, number 9-11 Edgar St, is roughly
where the lay-by is at the side of the store on the left-hand side of the
image.
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