Mountmellick - History

History

Other than that its a 15th-century settlement on the narrow Owenass river (River of the Falls in Irish) with an encampment on its banks at Irishtown. Overlooking this valley with its trees and wildlife was a small church called Kilmongan (Ivy Chapel) which was closed by the Penal Laws in 1640.

The Religious Society of Friends (the Quakers) came in 1657 led by William Edmundson. They saw a future for this settlement and built it into a town, which was to grow to eight thousand people, with twenty-seven industries which included breweries, a distillery, woollen mills, cotton, tanneries and glass. It was a boom town in the late 19th century.

One of its earliest Quaker settlers (ca. 1680), was Richard Jackson, who, with his brother Anthony, had been convinced of Quakerism in Eccleston, Lancashire, England by the missionaries George Fox and Edmundson. Richard's older brother Anthony settled in Oldcastle in County Meath at about the same time that Richard and his wife, Margaret Keete, came to Mountmellick. A possible son of Richard's named Nicholas, who had been born in Lancashire, married an Anne Mann in Mountmellick in about 1702. (Descendants of Nicholas and Anne came to New Garden Township in Chester County Pennsylvania, USA in the 1710s. Nicholas uncle, Anthony's son Isaac, also emigrated late in life to New Garden township in 1725, and settled in an area the family later called Harmony Grove, just outside present day New Garden. The house his grandson built still stands there, and is a Pennsylvania Historical site as it was used as a way station on the Underground Railroad during the civil war by Jackson descendants. Isaac sired a long line of Quaker families down to William Miller Jones (b. Philadelphia, 1852) who converted to Catholicism and hyphenated his middle and last names as Miller-Jones. His heirs continue to the present day with the Miller-Jones surname.

This Jackson family had originated in the village of Eske in the East Riding of Yorkshire in the early 16th century. The family prospered, in part due to fortuitous 16th- and 17th-century marriages into the prominent Todd, Frobisher and Hildyard families in Yorkshire. One son of the Jackson marriage to Ursula Hildyard was an earlier Anthony, who was in service to both Charles I and Charles II, and who was imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London during the Cromwellian era. He became Sir Anthony when, escaping, he went to the Netherlands to the court-in-exile of Charles II, and was knighted there by the king just prior to the Restoration. His sons included the above-mentioned Richard and Anthony, who had sided with Cromwell. Sir Anthony died in about 1666 and is entombed under the floor of the round tower of the Temple Church in the Inner Temple in London.)

There is still a Quaker population in the town, and a Friends meeting house. The town has numerous examples of Georgian architecture and one of the finest examples of a Georgian square in Ireland.