Buried on the Belfast Road, 15 September 2014
Ian Paisley
Ian Richard Kyle Paisley — founder of the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster in 1951, founder of the Democratic Unionist Party in 1971, First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2007 to 2008 — was buried in the graveyard of Ballygowan Free Presbyterian Church on Belfast Road on 15 September 2014. The funeral was private. There was a lone piper. The DUP leadership were not invited and neither were most of the Free Presbyterian church leaders he had fallen out with by the end. The grave is a simple stone on a hillside. The church keeps the gate open for anyone who wants to see it.
Open 10 September 1858, closed 15 January 1950
The railway
Ballygowan station sat on the Belfast and County Down Railway between Comber and Saintfield, on the line that ran from Queen's Quay in Belfast down to Newcastle. One platform on the south side, a level crossing at the Comber end, a goods shed added in 1898. The line closed in 1950 along with almost all of the BCDR — only the Bangor branch survived. The station building was demolished and replaced by a shop and a house. The goods shed is still standing, now used by a garage called Station Autos. The village owes its modern shape to the line that is no longer there.
A father, a son, a builder who fell
The Olivet Home
Alexander Orr Reid built the Olivet Home on the Comber Road in 1884–86 for £7,000, in memory of his only son, who had died suddenly — accounts at the time disagreed about whether it was a shooting accident or worse. Reid handed the building and seven acres to a trustee, vested in trust as a Home for Destitute Boys and Girls, and died before it was finished. By the 1911 census there were eighteen children — eight boys, ten girls, aged four to thirteen — and three staff. The orphanage closed in 1918 and the Presbyterian church bought it, ran it as the local school until the 1980s, and uses it now as the church halls. The inscription over the door reads 'The Time is Short'. The story is that a workman fell from the roof during construction and the words were carved for him.
A church founded in Crossgar, a grave in Ballygowan
The Free Presbyterians
Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster was founded on 17 March 1951 at Lissara, Crossgar — eight miles south of here — after a row about a gospel mission. Five session members, all the Sunday school teachers and sixty congregants walked out. The Ballygowan church on the Belfast Road came later, one of the dozens of Free Presbyterian congregations that grew across Ulster through the 1960s and 70s. It was not Paisley's home congregation. He chose it for the grave for reasons the family have kept to themselves. The Ballygowan Presbyterian church on the Main Street — a separate denomination — has been here almost two hundred years and is the older root.