From a mid-Antrim farmhouse to the White House
The Arthur cottage at Dreen
About a mile west of Cullybackey, on a back road in the townland of Dreen, there is a small, single-storey, whitewashed, thatched farmhouse — the kind that once stood by the thousand across rural Ulster and now stands by the dozen. It was the home of the Arthur family, small Presbyterian farmers of Scots descent. William Arthur was born here in 1796 and grew up in the cottage before emigrating in his late teens, around 1815, to Quebec and then to Vermont, where he became a Baptist minister. His fifth child, Chester Alan Arthur, was born in Vermont in 1829 and became the 21st President of the United States in September 1881, succeeding James Garfield after Garfield was assassinated. He served until 1885 and is best remembered today for signing the Pendleton Act, which began the dismantling of the spoils system in American federal hiring. The cottage was bought by the local council in the 1970s, restored, and is run today by Mid & East Antrim Borough Council as a small heritage site. It is open seasonally, usually summer afternoons. There is a turf fire, a few rooms of period interpretation, and a board explaining what an Antrim Presbyterian farmer's son went on to do. There is no shop, no café, and that is the right call.
Why the village is where it is
The River Maine
The River Maine rises up on the western slopes of the Antrim plateau, drops down through Glenwhirry, and runs north and west through Cullybackey and Galgorm before flowing into the north end of Lough Neagh near Toome. It is not a famous river. It is a working river. From the late 1700s into the 1900s the Maine drove the linen and bleach industry of mid-Antrim — the water-powered scutch mills, the beetling mills, the bleach greens spread out along the banks where webs of linen were laid in the sun to whiten. Cullybackey grew up around this. Hillmount, on the edge of the village, was a substantial mill complex for the better part of two centuries; the brand name survived into the late twentieth century making household linens. The mills are gone or rebuilt now and the river runs quieter past the village, but the bones of why Cullybackey exists are still readable along its banks.
Presbyterian, planted, milling
A linen village in the Bible Belt
Cullybackey is one of a string of mid-Antrim villages — Ahoghill, Broughshane, Galgorm, Portglenone — that share a common shape and a common history: Scots Presbyterian settlement from the 1600s onward, smallholding farms in the rich land between the Bann and the Antrim plateau, and from the 1700s a layer of linen and bleaching industry sitting on top of the farming. The village is overwhelmingly Protestant, mostly Presbyterian, with the social calendar that goes with it — the Twelfth, the Black Saturday in August, the Sunday-morning car parks at the churches all full at once. Free Presbyterianism is strong here as it is across the wider Ballymena hinterland; this was Ian Paisley's North Antrim constituency for forty years. The village is quieter politically than its bigger neighbours but the texture is the same. Sunday is Sunday. The shops shut. The pubs are restrained. The pews are full.