History
The Wyrley and Essington Canal passed through the site of Pelsall Junction as a result of a change of plan while the canal authorised by their first Act of Parliament was still being built. The original Act, obtained in 1792, was for a canal from collieries at Wyrley and Essington to Wolverhampton, where it would join the Birmingham Canal Navigations at Horseley Fields Junction. There was also to be a branch to serve Walsall, ending near to the present site of Birchills Junction. However, a second Act was obtained in 1794, which made the Walsall branch into the main line, and authorised its extension to the east, passing through Pelsall to reach Brownhills, where there were more coal mines, and then descending through thirty locks to the Coventry Canal at Huddlesford Junction. The new main line was completed by May 1797, although there were initial problems with water supply, which were resolved in 1800 with the construction of a large reservoir at Chasewater.
Following the amalgamation of the Wyrley and Essington with the Birmingham Canal Navigations in 1840, a number of extensions to the system had been made, which had proved successful, and the Cannock Extension Canal was one of a second batch of extensions begun in 1854. It ran from the Hednesford coal fields to the Wyrley and Essington Canal at Pelsall Junction, and was completed in 1863. When it opened, a branch with a flight of thirteen locks at Churchbridge linked it to the Hatherton Branch of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal. The canal and hence the junction was an important commercial route until 1961, when the battle with subsidence caused by the mines it served was lost. The section north of Watling Street was abandoned in 1963, and the junction now serves a quiet backwater, with boatyards at the old Brownhills colliery basins and just to the south of Watling Street.
Read more about this topic: Pelsall Junction
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The history is always the same the product is always different and the history interests more than the product. More, that is, more. Yes. But if the product was not different the history which is the same would not be more interesting.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)