History
The town was founded in the mid 17th Century by William Stewart, fourth and youngest son of the 2nd Earl of Galloway. The "New Town of Stewart" was granted Burgh status by charter from King Charles II allowing a weekly market and two annual fairs to be held.
It was on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Ninian at Whithorn in 1329 that Robert the Bruce forded the river where the present bridge stands.
Designed by John Rennie the Elder and built in 1813 the present bridge replaced the old bridge of 1745 which was destroyed by floods in 1806.
The industrialist, Sir William Douglas (died 1809), best known for founding the planned town of Castle Douglas, also established cotton mills in Newton Stewart, which was temporarily renamed "Newton Douglas" in his honour.
The nearby village of Blackcraig was once a major lead-mining centre. Granite from the area was used in the construction of most major dock-sides in Britain.
Read more about this topic: Newton Stewart
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)