History
The brewery was formed in 1828 when retired cotton manufacturer John Lees, who had been a major manufacturer of fustians, nankeens and jaconets with mills in Oldham and Manchester, purchased some land in Middleton, Lancashire and built Greengate Brewery, from which the company still operates. The company was renamed J.W. Lees & Co. Brewers, when John Lees' grandson, John William Lees, took over the company in 1876.
The company is still family owned and operated to the present day. When William, Simon, Christina and Michael Lees-Jones joined Richard and Christopher at JW Lees in the 1990s they were the sixth generation from the founder.
In June 2004, Greengate Brewery was included in the television show Most Haunted, and in 2003 HRH Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales, visited to celebrate the brewery's 175th anniversary.
Read more about this topic: JW Lees Brewery
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
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—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)