A planned settlement from about 1700
The Lawrences and the founding
The village takes its name from the Lawrence family who held the estate. The standard account — repeated on the Wikipedia entry for the village and in the local histories — credits Walter Lawrence with laying out an organised settlement here about 1700, his son Rear Admiral Peter Lawrence with enlarging it in 1750, and his grandson Col. Walter Lawrence with rebuilding it in 1765 to promote the linen industry among his tenants. The Lawrence family in question shared a name with the Lawrences of County Galway, who built a much grander Lawrencetown there in the same century; the two villages and the two families have been confused in print before. The Down village is the smaller and the older of the two namesakes, and the Bann is its argument for being remembered.
The Bann's first power spinning mill
Hazelbank, 1834
By the early 1700s the parish of Tullylish was already famous for its bleach greens — the long strips of grass where woven linen was laid out and watered to whiten in the sun. The water of the Upper Bann was reckoned the best in Ireland for the job. By 1772 there were twenty-six bleach greens along this stretch of river. Then in 1834 a Quaker manufacturer named Samuel Law built a flax spinning mill at Hazelbank on the edge of Lawrencetown — the first power spinning mill on the Bann, and one of the first in the country. It changed the scale of the work. Within a decade the great six-storey Dunbar McMaster mill had gone up at Gilford and the population of that village quintupled inside the Famine years. By the late 19th century, eighty per cent of the parish worked in linen.
Christy, Richardson, Uprichard, Nicholson, Sinton
The Quaker families
The linen industry of the Upper Bann was a Quaker affair for nearly two centuries. The Christys are credited with introducing linen bleaching to the valley around 1675; the Richardsons, Wakefields, Uprichards, Nicholsons and later the Sintons made it the industrial spine of the region. In Lawrencetown specifically, J T & H Uprichard and the Banford Bleach Works (latterly run by the Sintons) employed much of the village. They built meeting houses, schools, workers' rows, and the kind of austere brick mills that still stud the back lanes — some converted, some derelict, a few still in industrial use. The Quaker stamp is fainter now than it was, but the family names recur on every gravestone.
A pre-Emancipation chapel on the Point Road
St Patrick and St Colman
The Roman Catholic parish church stands at the corner of the Point Road, a Gothic church that pre-dates Catholic Emancipation — the building is older than 1830, which puts it among the earlier Catholic chapels in the diocese of Dromore. The bell tower was added in 1912. The dedication is to St Patrick (national, inevitable) and St Colman, the 7th-century bishop and founder associated with Dromore. The Tullylish GAA club, founded in the village in July 1944, was originally called St Patrick's after the same patron before it took the parish name. The two institutions — chapel and club — have run in parallel for eighty years.