The Douglas factory, 1726
The sailcloth town
Douglas was a mill village before it was anything else. The factory opened in 1726 on the dark stream that gives the place its name, and the village grew up to feed it. It made sailcloth - canvas heavy enough to drive a warship - and at its height supplied sails to the Royal Navy among others. Over a thousand spinners worked the trade from their own homes, with hacklers and bleachers and labourers preparing the raw flax in the village. The wheel-turned river was the engine of the whole place.
Huguenot hands, 1783-1801
The Besnards and the first powered spindles
The mills were built and run by Huguenot weavers and incomers rather than locals. The Besnard family acquired the works by 1783 and in 1801 installed the first powered spinning machinery in Ireland here in Douglas, bringing skilled workers down from Ulster and Scotland to run it. More mills followed through the 1800s - Lane's corn mill in 1845 on what is now the community park, flax and woollen mills, a rope and twine works. When the trade finally went, the suburb came and grew over most of the evidence.
Built 1784, burned 2016
Vernon Mount
Vernon Mount was the great house of Douglas - a curved-front Georgian villa built in 1784 for a Cork merchant, attributed to the architect Abraham Hargrave, with painted ceilings of national importance inside. It stood derelict for years on the hill above the suburb. In 2016 a group of teenagers got into the empty house and lit a bonfire; the fire gutted it, and the Irish Georgian Society and heritage bodies condemned the loss. The shell still stands. It is the one piece of grand history Douglas had, and it was let burn.
Open since 1958
KC and the chipper
KC's opened in the centre of Douglas village in July 1958, run by the Crawford family, and has been there ever since - through a fire and through the 2012 floods that put the village under water. It is the chipper people from across Cork will tell you is the best in the city, famous for its pitta sandwiches, and it became so much a part of the place that when it went up for sale the asking price made the national papers. It is not heritage in the official sense. In Douglas it is the realest landmark in the village.