A quarry that grew a village
Tobermore Concrete
Tobermore began in 1942 as a sand and gravel pit started by two Henderson brothers in the Magherafelt area. After the war, their brother Sam — a D-Day veteran — came home from France and put his savings into it. They moved into precast concrete products for the local trade in the 1950s, and in the late 1970s became one of the first firms on the island making block paving, marketed as 'Pavia'. David Henderson joined in 1976, took over as managing director in 1987, and pushed the company into the British market. It is now one of the largest paving and walling manufacturers in the UK and Ireland, and it is still based at the edge of the same Derry village.
Built in 1728
The Presbyterian church
The Tobermore Presbyterian congregation was formally created in 1737, after a first application to the Synod of Ulster the year before was turned down for fear of weakening the Maghera church. The Moyola River was set as the boundary between the two. The church building itself went up in 1728 — the Ordnance Survey memoirs of 1836 describe it as 'a plain white building with a slated roof, 69 feet by 25 feet inside'. The Knockloughrim congregation a few miles south, founded in 1696, was the parent of all the Presbyterian churches in this corner of Loughinsholin.
121 men, one small village
The Great War
From a village of around 350 people, 121 men enlisted with the 36th (Ulster) Division during the First World War. Twenty-four were killed; thirty-three came home wounded. The numbers are hard to take in until you walk the length of the village and try to picture them. Tobermore was overwhelmingly Protestant and unionist, and the Ulster Division recruited heavily here — the same pattern across most of south Derry.