The oldest industrially used rock formation in the region is the limestone laid down around 395 to 425 million years ago at Turners Hill. The Dudley limestone mines are well known but the lesser known formations around Walsall are very much larger. The next formations to be laid down were the ‘productive’ coal measures including the region’s world famous 30ft seam. During this Carboniferous Period the region also had significant deposits of ironstone and marl or brick clays. The coal measures were laid down in conditions of tropical swamp at a time when the planet’s water and atmosphere contained much less oxygen, so the trees did not easily rot, allowing the slow formation of coal. Evaporation of minerals in the tropical swamps left behind the balls of ironstone found underneath the coal. At this time Oldbury was roughly on the earth’s equator, joined to the land mass we now call Europe. It was also during this period of 300 or so million years ago that Dolerite, or ‘Rowley Rag’, was extruded from deep within the earth although the only true remains of a volcano in the area is Barrow Hill close to Pensnett Church in Dudley. The Rowley and Wednesfield extrusions are lateral along old rock strata, and this caused damage to the coal being laid down at the same time, particularly for the mines close to Rowley. The final major strata capping the region are sandstone layers which are dozens of feet thick in places.
Other than Wolverhampton a few Black Country places such as Oldbury, Langley, Rowley, Warley, Bilston and Wednesfield are mentioned in Anglo-Saxon writings prior to the Norman Conquest. These were generally small hamlets in the northernmost part of the Manor of Hales in Worcestershire. After the Norman Conquest William claimed all the land in England as his own and then granted it to others to manage. In this area he gave much of the manor of Halesowen and part of Warley (Warley Salop) to Roger Montgomery (the Earl of Shrewsbury) and the remaining half of Warley (Warley Wigorn) to William FitzAnsculf, who was based in Dudley. The forerunners of other towns and villages such as Cradley, Dudley, Smethwick, and Halesowen are mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 and although Rowley is not mentioned this may have been omitted due to its position of being part of the Royal Hunting Grounds. The title “Regis” was added around 1150 denoting its Royal Demesne status as part of the Royal Hunting Grounds and the omission was corrected by its inclusion in Henry II’s Pipe Rolls of 1172. Rowley Regis had a weekly Market Charter by 1293.
The ancient Parish of Rowley Regis is bounded by small streams dividing it from Quarry Bank, Netherton and Dudley to the West, Tipton to the North, Oldbury to the East, and by the River Stour separating Halesowen to the South. The Parish included smaller hamlets – The Brades, Tippity Green, Windmill End, Whiteheath Gate, Blackheath, Corngreaves, Cakemore, Cradley Heath, and Gosty Hill each of which were little more than a gathering of a few houses. And in the centre stood the basalt ridge on which the village of Rowley Regis stands. The ridge, two and a half miles long and one and a half miles wide forms part of the great backbone of England whereby all the water to the West drains into the Severn Estuary and the the Irish Sea, while that to the East drains through to Hull and the North Sea. In the 13th Century, when Rowley needed a Church it was made from Rowley Rag. Although some of the cottages built from the same material lasted well, the Church was in constant need of repair for the next 500 years until it was demolished and replaced in 1840.
The second suffered enormously from mining subsidence and was demolished only 64 years later and the third burned down in 1913 leaving the 4th church on this site to be rebuilt after the end of the Great War. In 1803 Rowley Windmill still stood 100 yards from the church. On 7th May 1831 it is said that 400 Rowley women walked to Newhall Hill near Birmingham and formed a raucous corner at a meeting of 200,000 attending to hear Thomas Attwood (of Halesowen) talk of votes for the common man in the Great Reform Bill (women would have to wait another 100 years). For 40 years since the American and French Revolutions it is said that this was the closest that England came to social insurrection. Between 1832 and 1834 some 67 people in Rowley (out of a population of 7500) died of cholera. In 1832 the Beerhouse Act enabled any rate-payer to brew and sell beer on payment of a licence. The intention was to increase competition between brewers; lowering prices and encouraging people to drink beer instead of gin. Gin and ale were regarded as being safer to drink than the water. It resulted in the opening of thousands of new public houses and breweries throughout the country, particularly in the rapidly expanding industrial centres. By 1841 in Rowley alone there were 39 licensed victualling houses and 57 beer shops not counting the houses also licensed to retail beer.
From the late 1700s the Rowley Hills had been heavily quarried and this started to destroy much of the rural aspect of the area. It is said that the highest farmed land in England used to sit atop Rowley Hills so although stone from there had been quarried for centuries initially extraction was small scale, most of it being used for stone boundary walls. By the late 1700s Rowley Rag was identified as one of the best materials for surfacing roads and paths and for making fences, kerbs and gutters. It was used extensively across a growing Birmingham and Black Country and with the industrial revolution driving the growth of the area the quarries became very busy. There were many quarries that often seemed to merge into each other – the Hailstone, Diamond Jubilee, Derby’s Hill and the largest of them all, the Lake Quarry plus smaller operations at Rough Hill and Little Samson. Edward Richard’s quarry, was close to the Hailstone Quarry, but each worked from different sides of Turners Hill.
The most striking Dolerite outcrop was known locally as The Hailstone – standing at the top of the hill it was some seven or eight feet square rising eight or nine feet above the summit of the hill. Saxon legend suggested it came from the sling of Thor and superstition grew about supernatural qualities if anyone tried to move it. When the Hailstone was finally removed by dynamite in 1879, there were two fatal deaths, one man who was setting the charge, the other from being hit by falling rock. Most families in the area during the sixteenth and seventeenth century had some metal working and smithing tools in their probate inventories at the time of their death, even if their official description remained Yeoman. A significant number of people combined nailing and other metal work with small farming. The life of a Nailer and his family was a hard one. The nail rod was taken from the nailmaster, cut into pieces of the correct length and hammered into shape. this was carried on in a “shop” that could be either attached to the house or separate. The man of the house could thus work at two trades, spending wet days at the fire and fine days in the fields. His wife and children were also at work, in this way enough was made for the family to live and there was less need for the offspring to leave as they grew because they could be absorbed into the activity.
To traditionalists the Black Country (a term used only from the 1840s) is the area where the 30ft coal seam – the thickest seam in England – comes to the surface. So this covers West Bromwich, Oldbury, Rowley, Blackheath, Cradley Heath, Old Hill, Bilston, Dudley, Tipton, Wednesfield and parts of Halesowen, Wednesbury and Walsall which are included but perhaps not Stourbridge, Smethwick, Warley or Wolverhampton. These all had coal, but not at the surface.
Whiteheath Gate, until 1800 and like the Parish of Rowley Regis and its neighbours, had remained mostly rural.. Metalworking was important in the area as early as the 16th century spurred on by the ease of access to the coal seam. As the population and associated trade grew, roads became a problem. The area that was to become the Black Country was generally flat with large stretches of uncultivated heath and no difficult rivers to cross – as such many rough tracks had developed that led between the neighbouring towns and villages that were not well identified or carefully looked after. Any Roman roads that had crossed the area had been poorly maintained and in many cases no longer existed. Traditionally for centuries the upkeep of roads in England had lain with landowners who were inconsistent with their upkeep so in the mid 1500s Parliament passed responsibility to the parishes where the roads were located. These local communities however had little incentive to look beyond their own boundaries. It was only in the 1700s with the increasing enclosure of common land and the coming of Turnpike roads that trade routes began to become defined and the condition of roads across the region began to improve – followed by the arrival of the Canal Age that took much heavy traffic away from the roads and allowed the necessary volumes of trade to be achieved.
Turnpike Roads were the first Toll Roads, producing funds for their own upkeep. The term “turnpike” refers the practice of placing a pikestaff across a road to block and control passage. Upon payment of the toll at “Gates” built especially for the purpose, the pike would be “turned” to one side to allow travellers through. Whiteheath Gate was the site of one such gate. The road to Wolverhampton through West Bromwich and Wednesbury was turnpiked in 1727, and the road through Smethwick to Wolverhampton in 1760. Most Turnpike roads survived well until competition from the railways caused most to be dis-turnpiked before 1880.
In 1767 Matthew Boulton with members of the Lunar Society sponsored the building of the first Birmingham Canal (completed in 1772) under the supervision of James Brindley from Wednesbury to the edge of Birmingham at Newhall Wharf (since built over) and Paradise Wharf (now Gas St) to join with the Worcester Canal. The same year the other end reached Wolverhampton and then further to the Staffs & Worcester Canal at Autherley. In between were many branches to many coal mines, pits, quarries, forges and factories, including Boulton’s own Soho Works. Brindley died a few days after completion of the route. Subsequently a New Main Line was created by Thomas Telford in 1827. By the mid 1800’s there were 160 miles of canal criss-crossing the area, the breathing arteries of the industrial revolution giving access to the major ports at Bristol, Liverpool, Hull and London.
It has been said that no area of England derived more benefit from turnpike roads and canals than did the Black Country and Birmingham.
The iron trade was introduced around Rowley at a very early stage. The first blast furnace recorded was built at West Bromwich in the early 1560s. In 1583, the accounts of the building of Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace show that nails were supplied by Reynolde Warde of Dudley. By the 1620s there were said to be 20,000 smiths of all sorts within ten miles of Dudley Castle. In 1628 Richard Foley, the son of a Dudley nailer established the first slitting mill at Kinver mechanising the production of nail rods from iron bar. In 1642 at the start of the Civil War Charles I failed to capture existing supplies of swords, pikes, guns, or shot along the South coast, and relied instead on supplies from Colonel Dud Dudley. From Stourbridge came shot, from Dudley came cannon. Small forges existed on every brook in the Black Country and turned out supplies of sword blades and pike heads for the King – whilst neighbouring Birmingham stood for the Parliamentarians. Development around Rowley would have centred along the river Stour. It was in the forges at Corngreaves that Dud Dudley first experimented with making iron using pit-coal instead of Charcoal, a process which he patented in 1665. In 1740 William Sideaway is the first to be recorded as manufacturing Jews-Harps. In 1799 the Rowley Enclosure Acts gave local mineral rights to the Earl of Dudley who could now sink a pit anywhere no matter what farm or building might be in the way.
By the coming of the Turnpike in the early 1700s the village of Whiteheath Gate covered an area of ¾ of a square mile and was still quite distinct from its neighbours. The Gate Inn stood at the crossroads in the middle of the village by the turnpike gate. The Vine Inn (now The Fox) was just down Titford Lane and the Bulls Head and The New Hotel (now the Whiteheath Tavern) were just down Birchfield Lane. At the back lay Pear Tree Farm and 4 dairy farms – Merris’s, Throne’s (Skidmore’s), Monk’s and Richard’s Farms. Towards Mincing Lane and Penncricket Lane went the route to Cakemore, Blackheath and Rowley where there was still a thatched cottage until about 1930 on the corner of what is now Uplands Avenue. But things were to quickly change. By 1774 James Brindley had constructed Titford Pools behind the Gate Inn to gather water from the Rowley Hills to provide a supply of water to a short summit level at Spon Lane on his Main-Line canal that linked Birmingham to Wolverhampton. Although initially the Pools must have provided a pleasant waterside attraction they were perhaps the harbinger of things to come.
When between 1825-1830 Thomas Telford drove his “new” main line between Birmingham and Wolverhampton he demolished Brindley’s short summit and redirected the feeder sending it instead to feed Rotton Park Reservoir. Then in 1837 William Fowler constructed the Titford Canal rising six locks above Brindley’s original to 511ft above sea level – the second highest canal in England behind only that at Rochdale to link the collieries on the Rowley Hills to the Main Line canal. The original feeder from the Pools was then widened to the top of the new locks to serve Langley Forge where after 1900 castings were produced using a 1.5 ton drop hammer. Two further branches were cut from the Pools – the Portway Branch to the North crossing Birchfield Lane to reach Pratts Brickyard and the collieries at Churchbridge and Newbury Lane where a tramway also served Samson Colliery, and secondly to the West to Swan Bridge underneath Titford Lane where there was a wharf and a tramway serving Rowley Hall Colliery, before turning South towards further works at Causeway Green. And as with the Main-Line canals lower down, new industry followed the new canal. Part way up the six locks an arm was constructed serving the alkali and phosphorous Works belonging to Jim Crow. Behind this was the Chemical Arm off the main canal for carrying phosphorus waste from Albright & Wilsons to the tip at Bradeshall. New collieries were dug on higher ground. In 1855 the Earl of Dudley sank Ramrod Hall Colliery in 1855 finding a good quality 25ft thick coal seam at 567 feet. In 1865 William Newman of Rowley Hall leased out 47 acres of coal, ironstone and basalt (if any) found underneath his home, including permission to run a tramway down to Titford Pools. In addition in 1880 a tramway was built from Hailstone Quarry at the top of Portway to the canal at Windmill End to transport the rock to where it was required.
But Came They All to Birmingham 