Over a series of articles, it is intended to examine the evolution of the ‘market place’, Tullamore to the fine square it is today. It is intended to look first at the evolution of the square over the period from 1713 to 1820 with additional comments on the building history in the last 300 years in the second article. This will be followed with analysis of the return for the 1901 and 1911 censuses and thereafter case studies of two of the houses in the square. Both are public houses, the Brewery Tap and The Phoenix, and business is conducted in the original houses albeit that both have been extended. Both are well known with the Brewery Tap one of the oldest pubs in Tullamore and The Phoenix the newest. The Brewery Tap house can be dated to 1713 and The Phoenix as a house to 1752.
In the sixth article we look at the history of the bridge behind the library, soon to be opened up to connect O’Connor Square with Church Street and the new Market Square or Cornmarket of 1820.
Previous blogs have looked at the ‘brick house’ and the Hibernian Bank on the corner of Bridge Street and O’Connor Square (now part of the Bank of Ireland, and GV 12 O’Connor Sq and GV 10 Bridge Street). A long article in Offaly Heritage 8 (2015, pp 76-115) reported on the Manly estate in Tullamore which included GV 1 and 2 High Street and GV 7 and 8 O’Connor Square.
There were almost 1,000 houses in Tullamore in the mid-nineteenth century, but with a few exceptions in Patrick Street, Bury Quay, O’Moore Street and Cormac Street, those north of the river are mostly post 1790. The oldest and finest of the houses are in Bridge Street, O’Connor Square and High Street. That would be about seventy in all with nine in Bridge Street, sixteen in O’Connor Square and forty-five buildings in High Street (1901).
All the houses in O’Connor Square are pre-1800 with the exception of the ‘brick building’ (GV 11), the old post office (GV 4), the school/library in O’Connor Square (GV 7), the PTSB (GV 8) and the two houses forming part of the Bridge Centre and the new post office (GV 1 and 2 High Street). Ten of the sixteen houses in the square were completed before 1800. Six were demolished and replaced with new structures.
It has been found convenient to use the numbering system in the printed Griffith Valuation of 1854 because the maps and the printed valuation are online and the relevant maps and the printed valuation record are reproduced in this text. The valuation records of 1843–54 provide a key moment in the recording of the building process that had been going on since the early 1700s.
We know that six of the sixteen houses were demolished and replaced, and that reasonably successfully. This was over the period 1870 to 1996 with three in the ten years 1986 to 1996. These are the Bridge Centre entrance (1995) and not in the same league as the new post office of 1996; the old post office of 1909; the new vocational school of 1937 (now the town library with renovations in 2011; the PTSB in 1987; the ‘brick building’ now part of the Bank of Ireland (1871).
In the use of Griffith’s Valuation (GV) of 1854 and its predecessor of 1843 the numbering systems were different and the same can be said of both the 1901 and 1911 censuses. We navigate our way through that issue as we proceed with the sixteen properties, bearing in mind that the four properties in High Street (GV 1–4) are treated as part of O’Connor Square west. This was mostly followed in the 1901 and 1911 censuses, and it makes more architectural sense to treat these four properties as part of O’Connor Square even though they have to be referred to as GV1-4 High Street to be consistent with Griffith’s Valuation of 1854.
Over the period 1700 to 1841 Tullamore’s town centre was developed and has largely survived. During that period agricultural output increased; communications improved as did distribution and market functions; mostly resident landlords encouraged development from c.1700; security considerations for the new colonists led to the building of a barracks in Tullamore in 1716 and trade and building followed with the development of mixed uses in Barrack Street (now Patrick Street) and the gradual development of building on the two sides of Bridge Street from the 1720s and up High Street to the location of the windmills on the hill behind O’Moore Street and Cormac Street.
The mid-1740s saw intensification of building with houses in ‘New Street’ being the southern side of O’Connor Square. This included a house for the Revd Mr Dixon (1752, now The Phoenix pub, GV 5) who would later provide a school and curate services for Tullamore as part of the parish of Durrow. The church of 1726 on Church Lane (later Church Street) would have been part of this development. The Mountrath estate map of 1730 by Thomas Moland provides indicators of such growth in Tullamore in the simple outline of Barrack Street, showing about twenty houses and prominent was the star-shaped boundary walls of the barracks ( a small part of which still survives). The map may be seen as a representation of Tullamore as a feature on the edge of the Mountrath estate. Algernon Coote, earl of Mountrath had an extensive land holding to the west of the emerging Charleville Demesne.[1] No more maps of Tullamore survive until the canal maps of c. 1800. Like Moland the Taylor and Skinner maps are skeletal only. However, there are some good lease maps for the 1740s to the 1760s of Tullamore building plots that were prepared by John Mooney of Geashill for the town’s landlord. Charles Moore.[2] Some of these are currently being digitized and will be available online at Offaly Archives.
By the 1760s three sides of O’Connor Square were largely completed as was much of High Street with large houses built by the Crow family (the Round House) and that of Colonel Crow close to the junction with the new square (GV 48 High Street). As will be shown below there was a layer of leases from 1713 underneath those created in 1786 but which have not all survived save as memorials (without maps) in the Registry of Deeds.
The market place was at the heart of the urban economy and a town from the earliest times was a place of exchange where farmers met the townspeople and other dealers to buy and sell. That has gone on ever since with the Tullamore Farmers’ Market of today and the Mart at Ardan Road, Tullamore representing its modern-day manifestation at close range, and now regulated by legislation rather that landlord intervention. The sale of good and animals in towns was under licence from the town’s landlord in consideration of the payment of tolls. The landlords in Birr and Tullamore, for example, held their authority under grants from the Crown from 1620 and 1622 respectively. Additional grants issued from that time and by the 1890s Tullamore had twelve fair days every year and two market days each week. Tolls were payable by the sellers to an agent of the landlord who in turn paid an annual fee to the landlord for the concession. Farm vegetables were sold in the Tullamore market house (GV 10) from 1789 to c. 1820, and the farm animals on the streets. The shambles or abattoir was behind the market house and fees for the sale of livestock were equated to a tongue of the animal or a cash sum. The paying of Tolls in Tullamore ceased as early as 1843.
New market place at the Cornmarket or Market Square from 1820
The weekly markets and the fairs grew in volume and by the early 1800s the square was sufficiently ‘gentrified’ to warrant developing a market square elsewhere. This was in the contemplation of the town’s new landlord from 1790 when sites were offered for sale in William/Columcille Street based on the plan of John Pentland who had designed the market house. Church Street north was already leased so that left Harbour Street to be developed over the period from 1805 to 1825 and Henry/O’Carroll Street from the 1830s. The key plot here was that leased out in 1822 for a distillery (now The Granary apartments). This location had been intended as the site of the new Church of Ireland church from 1808 but the Hop Hill site was preferred by the rector. The new distillery buildings marked the completion of what would become the Market Square and with it the move of the markets and the fairs to the new location away from the fine houses of the old market place to an area closed in by the back gardens and warehouses of the tenants fronting the streets and to be called the Cornmarket. An added incentive for the new Cornmarket (now the new Market Square) was the location of the new canal harbour nearby in 1800. The gardens of the houses in William/Columcille, Harbour and Henry/O’Carroll Street had all to be shorter to facilitate the new market square.
The smelly shambles was moved from the back of the market house in the first market square to a new shambles on the site of the former Protestant church in Church Street in about 1820. All this by way of saying that the market place, called Market Square in the Pigot 1824 directory would soon be called Charleville Square, and after 1905 was officially called O’Connor Square. The old square, fully completed by 1800 was the finest residential area in Tullamore.
Charleville Square was now almost entirely residential save on the west side and the corners with High Street and Bridge Street. A shop was a room in a house and large plate glass windows in Tullamore were not seen until the mid-1890s. Evidence of this can be seen in the two photographs of O’Connor Square south c. 1895 and O’Connor Sq., west c. 1905-10. Advertising in the country towns was minimal with only the national companies featuring at railway stations and from 1900 at the new garages and cycle shops. A feature of the new trading on the edge of O’Connor Square was the prominence of Catholic traders and merchants such as Molloys and Ryans, close to the old Flanagan distillery which was redeveloped by Michael Molloy as the Tullamore distillery in 1829 (later that of Bernard Daly and D.E. Williams).
[1] See the blog by Arnold Horner at http://www.tcd.ie/library/manuscripts/blog/2016/09/thomas-molands-1730-maps-for-the-earl-of-mountrath/#more-2150.
[2] These maps are with leases of Tullamore plots in Offaly Archives. See also Arnold Horner, ‘Some examples of representation of height data on Irish maps before 1750’, Irish Geography, vii (1974), pp 68-80. See pp 76-77 for a note on John Mooney, Geashill, map maker.
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