Ellenroad Mill

Ellenroad Mill was a cotton spinning mill in Newhey, a village in the Milnrow area of Rochdale, England. It was built as a mule spinning mill in 1890 by Stott and Sons and extended in 1899. It was destroyed by fire on 19 January 1916. When it was rebuilt, it was designed and equipped as a ring spinning mill.^{[citation needed]}

After closure, the mill itself was demolished in 1982, but the engine house – complete with steam engine – and the boiler house chimney were retained. Ownership passed to the Ellenroad Trust. The Ellenroad Ring Mill Engine is steamed on the first Sunday of the month (except January for boiler inspection). The twin tandem compound 3,000hp steam engine is the largest in the world on its original site, with several other engines working, and in process of restoration.

Ellenroad mill was situated on flat land alongside the river in Newhey (archaically "New Hey".) The village lies at the foot of the Pennines, in the valley of the River Beal, 2.7 miles (4.3 km) east-southeast of Rochdale and 10.3 miles (16.6 km) northeast of Manchester.

Historically a part of Lancashire, Newhey was anciently a hamlet within the township of Butterworth. It was described in 1828 as "consisting of several ranges of cottages and two public houses". In the early 19th century, a major road was built through Newhey from Werneth to Littleborough. Newhey was incorporated into the Milnrow Urban District in 1894. There were five mills recorded in Newhey in 1920: including Ellenroad, Newhey, Coral, Haugh and Garfield.

The Rochdale Canal which officially opened in 1804, providing a broad canal link across the Pennines and consequently became an important transport corridor. The canal started at the Bridgewater Canal, linked with the Ashton Canal, and passed through Ancoats, Droylsden, Moston, Middleton and Chadderton before passing to the south of Rochdale and the north of Milnrow and Newhey, towards Todmorden. The canal carried coal and cotton to the mills, and the completed yarn to the weaving sheds. In 1890, the canal company had 2,000 barges and traffic reached 700,000 tons/year, the equivalent of 50 barges a day. It provided an axis for the development of the cotton industry. Newhey was nearly 2 miles (3km) from the canal and was late in building cotton mills. More significantly the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway built the Oldham Loop Line through Milnrow and Newhey in 1863. The engine house of Ellenroad mill now lies to the south of Junction 21 of the M62 motorway.

Rochdale was a prime site for cotton spinning in 1890 as it was conveniently close to coal fields and railways, aiding both the importation of raw materials and the processing of textiles.

The Ellenroad mill was a conventional, late nineteenth century, cotton mill. During the boom of the late 1880s, a limited company, the Ellenroad Spinning Co. Ltd, was formed to build a new mill. They chose the well-respected Oldham architects of Stott and Sons to manage the design and construction. The design was for a conservative five-storey 40-bay mule spinning mill, with detached engine and boiler houses, driving the line shafts by means of a rope drive. Stotts designed 5 mills in Rochdale, for instance in 1888 they had erected the Moss Mill. For the steam engine they went to the local firm of J & W McNaught and chose a single triple-expansion horizontal engine, which in 1890 produced the greatest efficiency in terms of power per ton of coal. The steam was raised by five Lancashire boilers. These required a 220 ft chimney to provide the draught. Work commenced February 1891, and the first cotton was passing through the card room in May 1892, the final mule was installed and in operation by December 1892. Because this was a Stott mill, it is likely that the whole of the machinery would have come from one supplier and this would have been Platt Brothers of Oldham or failing that Dobson & Barlow. The mill would have had humidifiers and a sprinkler system. The mill was extended by Stott and Sons in 1899.

At this point in its history it might be expected that the mill then followed the conventional course of its contemporaries: the industry peaked in 1912 when it produced 8 billion yards of cloth; The First World War of 1914–18 halted the supply of raw cotton; and the British government encouraged its overseas colonies to build mills to spin and weave cotton. The war over, Lancashire would never regain its markets.