Hiring Fairs and Market Places - County Armagh [part 7 of 8]

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extracted from the Appletree Press title Hiring Fairs and Market Places by May Blair.

COUNTY ARMAGH

The best market town in the county was Portadown. Trading there dates back to 1631 when Michael Obins and his mother Prudence secured a patent for a fair and market. The Obins family brought with them fourteen English families. Around the same time the first bridge was built across the Bann.
In 1814 the Obins estates were sold to the Sparrow family of Tandragee and some years later Millicent Sparrow married Lord Mandeville, who later became the sixth Duke of Manchester. Some of these people are remembered in the street names of Portadown today. Although the Duke had a patent for fairs and markets in the town he never collected any tolls. In 1878 the town commissioners bought the market rights on a lease lasting nine hundred and ninety nine years. They then built new market places and levied a charge on the traders using them. The markets, including a fair green situated off Shillington Street, comprised in all about seven acres. Markets were held every Saturday and from the nineteenth century onwards a fair was held on the third Saturday in every month, together with three old fairs held on Easter Monday, Whit Monday and 13 November. Portadown was the main centre for selling the hundreds of black cattle which grazed the meadows on either side of the Bann. They were sold at the fair green or in the nearby streets. Farmers always sold a cow with a full udder as this helped the sale. Sometimes the new owner milked the cow before setting off for home. If the locals timed it right they could go home with a free can of milk. Hiring took place on the first Wednesday of every third month. Attempts were made to start a horse fair in Portadown but without success.
An abundance of produce and livestock arrived into the town on their allotted days to their allotted places and the sellers were charged a small fee. In 1888 the charge for selling a cow was two-pence; one penny for a calf or pig; young pigs in a cart a half-penny. Sellers of butter paid from a half-penny for under 10lb weight to three ha’pence for over 20lb and those selling eggs paid a penny per hundred. Charges for poultry ranged from two-pence per dozen for hens to four pence per dozen for geese and turkeys. A load of apples cost the seller a penny while a load of root vegetables, hay or straw cost two-pence. No charge was made on the sale of grain but a penny was levied on a bag of grass seed. It was a common sight in those days to see a grass seed merchant remove his hard hat and shake a small sample of seed on the crown to test its purity before buying. The black surface of the hat showed up flawed seed immediately and the price was adjusted accordingly. Rather than take a bad price the farmer would sometimes take the seed home again for further cleaning. The price might even rise before the next market.
Fruit and vegetables were sold in Market Street; crockery, rope and tin-ware in High Street; new-laid eggs – white, brown, bantam or lovely blue duck eggs – in the market in Mandeville Street; squealing pigs in Woodhouse Street and so on. The Saturday market was a great source of entertainment for town and country folk alike, and nothing was left untried in the line of side-shows that could make the day more enjoyable. Second-hand clothes sellers excelled themselves with their banter and sales talk.
In spite of the thousands of weavers in the cottages in the surrounding countryside, and (later) in the factories, the town never had a good linen market. This was offset by the excellent markets in Armagh and Lurgan and to a lesser degree in Tandragee. However all of this came to an end in the first half of the twentieth century. When the linen mills closed, the premises were utilised in other ways. For instance Watson Armstrong’s weaving mill was used as an ordnance factory during the war and afterwards as a pottery by Wade Ireland Limited. Many of the goods produced by the latter are today much sought after by collectors – their famous whimsies [miniature ceramic animals] for example.
The town grew rapidly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the opening of the Newry and Lagan Canals. These gave Portadown direct links with Belfast and Dublin and for a time with Scotland and Wales. By 1836 merchants in the town owned eighteen boats which imported and exported thousands of tons of merchandise annually. Iron, coal, timber, slates, flour and oatmeal were imported; grain was the main export. In addition ninety tons of pork a year on average went to Belfast on carts. These returned loaded with such things as tea, sugar, hardware and cotton and woollen goods.
Boatmen and their families lived on board their boats. They paid their dues to trustees who were to see to it that the money was used for the good of the town, namely to keep the quay in good repair and to make sure that the town was clean and well lit. Their efforts were frustrated by a private individual who built a larger quay but charged the same amount in dues.
With the arrival of the railways in the middle of the nineteenth century, Portadown was not only the main port on the canal between Newry and Lough Neagh – it was also an important junction on the Great Northern Railway. It was not just a market town: it was also a manufacturing town with 3,000 employed in its mills and factories. Spinning and weaving went on at the same time in several thousand homes in the countryside. Many of the cottagers had apple orchards, especially to the west of the town towards Loughgall. At the height of the season anything up to 200 cart loads of apples arrived into the market on a Saturday.

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