Thomas Acres Pierce (sometimes written as Peirce) the eldest son of Dr Pierce (d. 1859) who succeeded his father and mother at Acres Hall died in 1879. Colonel Thomas Acres Pierce, (he was an officer in the King’s County Militia and in his early years the regular army) died suddenly in December 1879 of a heart attack. The local newspaper of the time noted that his father and grandfather (doctor and solicitor respectively also died in similar circumstances). Pierce was for a time local inspector of prisons and secretary to the grand jury of the county. While locally prestigious these were not remunerative appointments. He had married Miss F. G. French in 1856 and had issue – six children, the last dying in 1937. Not surprisingly with the smaller shares and number of dependants the Acres Estate got into financial difficulties in the 1880s. At the time of the death of another of the ten children of Dr Pierce, John Pierce, in 1889 his son Donald McFarlane Pierce (b. 1869) succeeded to Acres Hall and at the same time he managed to purchase a moiety of the entire Acres Estate for the sum of £4,703, and this money was raised through four new mortgages on the Tullamore properties. Donald M. Pierce married Mary Frances Murphy in 1896, and the marriage settlement was made in South Africa. He had married a Roman Catholic which in those days may have been difficult for some members of the family. There were at least four children of that marriage, Bernard, Donald, Fr. John (parish priest of Rathmines in the 1970s) and Robert Acres Pierce.[1] Donald Pierce and family returned to Ireland and were living on the terrace opposite the old family home in 1901 and 1911. In the 1911 Donald Pierce was described as a commercial traveller.Two members of the earlier Acres family, from which Thomas Acres is thought to have come, survived in the Roscrea area up to the 1970s
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Nesbitt’s Junction and the Edenderry-Enfield Railway Line and the end of era. By Declan O’Connor. No. 2 in our Offaly History Anniversaries Series marking past events of significance. Blog No 637, 3rd August 2024
The image is that of a cancelled return rail excursion ticket from Edenderry to Dublin on the 17th of March 1963. The event was the Railway Cup inter Provincial Finals in Hurling and Football. Four Offaly Players were selected – Greg Hughes, Paddy McCormack, Charlie Wrenn and Sean Brereton. It was the last passenger or goods train to use the Edenderry – Enfield Branch or Slip Line which started almost 86 years earlier. Would you like to contribute a story. Email us info@offalyhistory.com first.
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Tullamore’s ‘Chop’ Factory. By Michael Goodbody. From our new Anniversaries Series. Blog No 636, 30th July 2024
This article is not about the fashionable ‘Chopped’ clean food eateries. Instead, it concerns what was fed to our horses, in particular, before World War 1. That was a time of increasing use of motorised transport and less of horse-drawn vehicles. It was in 1904 that Motor Registration was introduced in Ireland, the War began in August 1914 and by 1924 the Goodbody Chop business in Tullamore was gone. Now read on in this our new Anniversaries Series. Our thanks to Michael Goodbody for this contribution to our blog series. You can find almost 650 articles about Offaly History on our website, http://www.offalyhistory.com. If you wish to write an article contact info@offalyhistory.com. Our blogs get 2,000 views per week.
Nineteenth century towns and cities were alive with the bustle and noise of people going about their daily business. Sometimes overlooked are the thousands of horses that were needed to support all this activity. Before the invention of the motor car horsepower was what drew cabs, coaches, heavy goods carts and light passenger vehicles. A city such as Dublin probably contained up to 20,000 horses and ponies.[1]
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