How the village got built around a flax wheel
Hugh Dunbar and the mill
Hugh Dunbar of Huntly Glen, near Banbridge, came from a Banbridge linen family. In 1834 he set his mind on a thread-spinning works on the Bann at Gilford, partnered with W. A. Stewart of Edenderry, and started trading in February 1836 out of rented premises on Mill Street. Construction of the big spinning mill began in 1837 and was completed in November 1841. Dunbar died in 1847 — within six years of his mill opening. His relatives sold their interest to John Walsh McMaster, who moved into Dunbar's recently finished Dunbarton House and named his son Hugh Dunbar McMaster. From then on the firm was Dunbar, McMaster & Co. The village around it became Dunbarton.
Houses, school, dispensary — and a mill that owned them
The model village
Dunbar McMaster & Co. didn't just build a mill — they built a self-contained industrial village around it. Over 180 terraced cottages went up in the streets we now call Dunbarton Street and the Dunbarton Bungalows. The company ran a school, a dispensary, a savings bank. By 1870 the mill employed over 2,000 hands. The pattern was repeated worldwide — when business boomed, McMaster opened a satellite mill in Greenwich, New York in 1880, also called Dunbarton Mills. The Gilford houses outlived the company by decades. Many are still occupied.
167 workers, 1986
The closure
The decline was the slow century-long decline of the Irish linen trade — undercut by cotton, by synthetics, by mills that moved closer to bigger ports. Dunbar McMaster & Co. limped on long after the heyday. The Gilford mill closed for good in 1986. At the gate that morning there were 167 workers — down from the 2,000-plus of the 1870s. The buildings stood empty for years. Fires, vandalism, scrub growth. In the 2020s a developer secured planning permission for a mixed-use restoration of the listed shell. As of this writing the work is in progress.
A Scottish-Baronial pile up the hill
Gilford Castle
Up on the rise outside the village sits Gilford Castle, a Scottish-Baronial country house designed by Glasgow architect William Spence and built in 1865 for Benjamin Dickson — a partner in Dunbar, McMaster & Co. and a man who plainly wanted to live up the hill from the mill that paid for it. The house was little used until 1914, when James Francis Wright, a Hong Kong and Manila stockbroker married to a niece of Sir Thomas Jackson of HSBC, bought it and made it home. His descendants stayed for over a century. Robert and Adrienne Moffett took over the estate in 2019 and are restoring it. Not open to the casual visitor — but if a wedding or estate tour is on, take it.