Sion Mills - History

History

The name Sion comes from the townland of Seein, which lies to the south of the village. It is an anglicization of an Irish placename: either Suidhe Fhinn (meaning "seat of Finn") or Sidheán (also spelt Síodhán and Sián, meaning "fairy mound"). The second part of the name is the English "mill".

Sion Mills was laid out as a model linen village by the Herdman brothers, James, John and George. In 1835 they converted an old flour mill on the River Mourne into a flax spinning mill, and erected a bigger mill behind it in the 1850s. However, nearly everything in Sion Mills today was designed later, in the 1880s and 1890s, by James Herdman's son-in-law, the English architect William Frederick Unsworth.Sion House, a half timbered Elizabethan style mansion originally built in the early 1840s, was largely remodeled and expanded in the 1880s by Unsworth, around the same time as he was designing the first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (this theatre was destroyed by a fire in 1926). More modest half timbered buildings include the gatehouse, the Recreation Hall and Old St. Saviour's Church. Unsworth based his design for the polychrome Anglican church, the Church of the Good Shepherd (1909), on a church in Pistoia in Tuscany. This church is built in an Italian neo-Romanesque style. By contrast, the modern Church of St Teresa (1963, by Patrick Haughey), the Catholic place of worship, is admirable for its severely plain lines - a long rectangle with a striking representation of the Last Supper on the slate facade. Oisín Kelly was the artist.

A prominent local landlord and businessman in the area in the early 20th century was Brigadier General Ambrose St. Quentin Ricardo, C.M.G., C.B.E., D.S.O., Q.S.A. (1866-1923), a director of Herdman's Ltd.. Born at Gatcombe Park, his family's seat in Gloucestershire in Britain, he had married Elizabeth Alice ('Ella') Herdman in Thyet Myo in Burma (then a part of the Raj) in 1893 and had settled in Sion Mills around 1903. He was largely instrumental in having the Church of the Good Shepherd built in the village, construction beginning in 1909. He and his wife carried out many other improvements to the village, and they were amongst the founders of the Derry Feis. Brig. Gen. Ricardo was buried in the vestibule of the church upon his death in 1923. He was a great-grandson of the famous political economist David Ricardo (1772-1823).