History
The town straddles the Roman road called Akeman Street, which runs through it as the High Street.
The Manor of Treunga is described in the Domesday survey of 1086. In 1682 the mansion of Tring Park designed by Sir Christopher Wren was built for the owner Colonel Guy, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber to Charles II. A later tenant was Lawrence Washington, great-grandfather of George Washington, first President of the USA.
In the late 19th century the estate became the home of the Rothschild family, whose influence on the town was considerable. Nathan Mayer Rothschild's son Lionel Walter Rothschild (2nd Lord Rothschild, 1868–1937) built a private zoological museum in Tring. This housed perhaps the largest collection of stuffed animals worldwide. As The Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, it has been part of the Natural History Museum since 1937. In April 2007 the museum changed its name to the Natural History Museum at Tring in order to make people more aware of the museum's link to London's Natural History Museum.
Gerald Massey (1828–1907) – poet, literary critic, Egyptologist and Spiritualist – was born nearby at Gamnel Wharf, New Mill, on the Wendover Branch of the Grand Union Canal. Goldfield Mill is a converted windmill in Tring.
The 2nd Lord Rothschild also released the edible dormouse into Tring Park. He used to ride around the town in a zebra-drawn carriage and the town's symbol has been the head of a zebra ever since.
Stanley Lief (1890—1962) converted the stately home Champneys into a Nature Cure sanatorium which he ran in the 1930s for about 20 years.
The former livestock market in Tring, redeveloped in 2005, was believed to be the last remaining example of its type in the UK. It is now the home of weekly Friday Market and fortnightly Saturday farmers Market. Some of the former livestock pens have been retained. The old livestock market office is now the home of the Tring Local History Museum, which opened in September 2010.
In 2008 Tring became a Transition Town with the support of Tring Town Council.
Read more about this topic: Tring
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)