The life of George Stephenson, railway engineer - Lighthouse ...

194 LIFE OF GEORGE STEPHENSON. [chap. xvn.
Before leaving the subject of the Stockton and Darlington
Railway, we cannot avoid alluding to one of its most remarkable
and direct results—the creation of the town of Middlesborough-
on-Tees. When the railway was opened in 1825, the site of this
future metropolis of Cleveland was occupied by one solitary
farmhouse and its outbuildings. All round was pasture land or
mud banks ; scarcely another house was within sight. But when
the coal-export trade, fostered by the halfpenny maximum rate
imposed by the legislature, seemed likely to attain a gigantic
growth, and it was found that the accommodation furnished at
Stockton was insufficent, Mr. Edward Pease, joined by a few of
his Quaker friends, bought about 500 or 600 acres of land, five
miles lower down the river—the site of the modern Middlesbor-
ough—for the purpose of there forming a new seaport for the
shipment of coals brought to the Tees by the railway. The line
was accordingly shortly extended thither; docks were exca-
vated ; a town sprang up ; churches, chapels, and schools were
built, with a custom-house, mechanics' institute, banks, ship-
building yards, and iron factories; and in a few years the port
of Middlesborough became one of the most ipiportant on the
northeast coast of England. In the year 1845, 505,486 tons
of coals were shipped in the nine-acre dock, by means of the ten
coal-drops abutting thereupon. In about ten years a busy popu-
lation of about 6,000 persons (since swelled into 15,000) occu-
pied the site of the original farmhouse. More recently, the
discovery of vast stores of ironstone in the Cleveland Hills, close
adjoining Middlesborough, has tended still more rapidly to aug-
ment the population and increase the commercial importance of
the place. Iron furnaces are now blazing along the vale of
a large proportion of their capital at a low rate of interest, whilst the share
capital upon which dividend was paid, remained comparatively small. These
arrangements, however, prove the shrewd business qualities of the meu who
originally conducted the undertaking. The results, as displayed in the an-
nual dividends, must have been eminently enooaraging to the astute commer-
cial men of Liverpool and Manchester, who were then engaged in the prose-
cution of their railway. Indeed, the commercial success of the Stockton and
Darlington Company may be justly characterized as the turning-point of the
railway system. With that practical illustration daily in sight of the public,
it was no longer possible for Parliament to have prevented its eventual extension.