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Updated: June 1, 2025
After serving an apprenticeship in his native town, he was sent to Coalbrookdale on a mission of business, where he became acquainted with the Darby family, and shortly after married Hannah, the daughter of Abraham the second.
They seemed to vie with each other in turning out the best castings, and their models or patterns were made with the utmost care. I was particularly impressed with the cheerful zeal and activity of the workmen and foremen of this justly celebrated establishment. On leaving Coalbrookdale I trudged my way towards Wolverhampton. I rested at Shiffnal for the night.
The colliers and iron-workers of Coalbrookdale and Madeley were ignorant, brutal, and much given to drunkenness and profanity. The Sabbath was ignored, decency frequently flouted, bull-baiting a favourite pastime, and religion a matter of coarse ridicule and bitter scorn.
He then entered upon the conduct of the iron and coal works at Ketley and Horsehay, where he resided for six years, removing to Coalbrookdale in 1763, to take charge of the works there, on the death of his father-in-law. By the exertions and enterprise of the Darbys, the Coalbrookdale Works had become greatly enlarged, giving remunerative employment to a large and increasing population.
Thus, also, was the use of iron as an important material in bridge-building fairly initiated at Coalbrookdale by Abraham Darby, as the use of iron rails was by Richard Reynolds.
Reynolds while managing the Coalbrookdale Works, was the adoption by him for the first time of iron instead of wooden rails in the tram-roads along which coal and iron were conveyed from one part of the works to another, as well as to the loading-places along the river Severn.
Determined not to be baulked in his enterprise, Darby abandoned the Bristol firm; and in the year 1709 he removed to Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, with the intention of prosecuting the enterprise on his own account.
In the coal-forest period, and the age of trees and rank vegetation, insects of many kinds seem to have multiplied, even though the most beautiful of all were not yet launched in air. In England the first beetle wandered on to the stage of life the oldest British insect fossil known. It was discovered in the ironstone of Coalbrookdale, and was a kind of weevil.
A Coalbrookdale correspondent, writing in May, 1862, informs us that "at the present time the bridge is undergoing repair; and, special examination having been made, there is no appearance either that the abutments have moved, or that the ribs have been broken in the centre or are out of their proper right line.
It consisted of a single arch of 130 feet span, the segment of a very large circle, calculated to resist the tendency of the abutments to slide inwards, which had been a defect of the Coalbrookdale bridge; the flat arch being itself sustained and strengthened by an outer ribbed one on each side, springing lower than the former and also rising higher, somewhat after the manner of timber-trussing.
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