In this article we are looking at the houses from the courthouse to the junction with O’Moore Street. The area was residential but with the two big public buildings – the jail and the courthouse, and across from the courthouse was low-lying land used for farming purposes and in the corner the old town graveyard. For a decade or so from the mid-1830s two of the houses were transformed into a hotel to serve the courthouse and assizes among others. It was in house GV 13 that Benajamin Woodward was born in 1816 and described as ‘the most celebrated and original architect of nineteenth-century Ireland, designing over sixty buildings in the last twelve years of his life.’ We start with no. 14, the three-storey over basement house on the corner with the two faces – one to O’Moore Street and one to Cormac Street. The houses are numbered in Griffith’s printed valuation of 1854 (see image) as being numbers 3 to 14 and were built on the Windmill Hill site that Thomas Acres obtained from Charles William Bury, the town’s landlord, in 1795, supplemented in the late 1830s with land for the two big houses beside the courthouse.
What we construct and what we take down is often the most significant indicator of the nature and health of our society. Also, the choice of an aesthetic style for a new building tells us much about the values of its proposer. Government or religious institutions will seek to emphasise their role and power by providing substantial and prominent structures, often using ancient architectural styles to suggest their continuity and permanence. Successful businesses or go-ahead institutions will express their vitality and cosmopolitanism in a more modern manner. Home builders may wish to attract respect for their taste and sophistication.
There are 20 houses in all from south of the town hall and as far as the junction with the road to Kilcruttin beside the railway station. Following the numbering of these houses in the first valuation of 1843 and the second published in 1854 can be confusing. The numbers in the 1843 survey inclusive of Acres Hall are 505 to 520, with the count commencing at the single-storey over basement cottage at the junction of Cormac Street with the later road to Kilcruttin and finishing at Acres Hall (no. 520). That in the printed valuation of 1854 was Charleville Street nos 1 to 11. No. 1 was the home of Dr Pierce, son-in-law of Thomas Acres, and his wife Ellen and their ten children. The story of the house and the family we have looked at in blogs 2, 3 and 4 on Cormac Street, once called Charleville Street because it was the road to Charleville Demesne, the home of the Moore family from 1740 to 1764 and the Burys from 1764 to the present day (albeit now Hutton Bury since 1963).
The James Francis Fuller-designed church was one of two new Church of Ireland churches in the Tullamore area completed in the 1880s. The other was at Lynally and was the gift of Lady Emily Bury (died 1931) to mark the recent death of her young husband Charles Kenneth Howard. That at Durrow was to replace the 150-year-old church in Durrow Abbey demesne and which had been rebuilt in about 1730. Other churches such as Tullamore, Killeigh and Geashill had all benefited from funding in the early 1800s and were in better order. That said there was probably a degree of self-interest as much as selflessness in the gift of the new church at Durrow by Otway Fortescue Graham Toler. The old church was in Durrow Demesne close to the manor house of the Norbury family and one could understand them wanting to see it placed elsewhere. The well-known agent, Toler Garvey, had beautified the demesne with the provision of a new well and the placing of the High Cross in the graveyard in a line from the entrance door to the old church. The Norburys had purchased the Durrow estate in 1815, and it was here that the second earl was murdered by an aggrieved tenant in January 1839. It appears that the family did not take up residence in the new manor house until the mid to late 1850s.
The new Church of Ireland church, Durrow, completed in 1881.This view about 1990.(more…)
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
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.
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]
This handsome house was built in 1786 by Thomas Acres and is set well in from the street. The valuer of 1843 wrote: ‘This has always been considered the best house in Tullamore – it is well situate – extensive pleasure grounds in front and rear, and well walled garden.’[1] Acres Hall, the town hall since 1992, is a five-bay, two-storey house with a limestone ashlar façade. In this respect it bears comparison with the house of Dr Wilson of 1789 (now Farrellys) in High Street and was built at the same time.
Last week we set out reasons why Cormac Street can be considered so good. Anybody getting off the train, visiting the town park or the courthouse cannot but be impressed. The street is very largely intact since it was built and has been enhanced by the town park. The restoration of the full Kilcruttin Hill beside the folly should be undertaken by the municipal council given its historic importance. Charleville/Cormac Street was the outer extremity of the town when building started here in the 1780s. Probably the Elmfield house (now the location of the Aras an Chontae) dates to 1795. Both Norris of that house and Acres of Acres Hall (dated to 1786) were functionaries of the young landlord’s family and both built on the road to the demesne. Bury came of age in June 1786 and so could regulate matters himself. While there were some cabins on Charleville Road these were temporary structures and aside from Elmfield no building leases were granted here until that to Daniel E. Williams in 1898. He completed Dew Park by 1900 and it was then regarded as the best house in Tullamore having taken that honour from Acres Hall. It reflected changing times with the demise and relative impoverishment of the Acres family and the growing importance of the new Catholic merchant class of Egan’s and Williams. While Williams had a virtual freehold in Dew Park lands the Egan family took a long lease from the Acres Pierce family of Acres Hall in 1891. The third big house that of Elmfield may well have earned the first-place honour but the Goodbodys sold this house in the 1880s and moved to Dublin. Richard Bull, the sub-sheriff moved in and departed after 1904 when the house was taken by Dr Kennedy who had moved from The Cottage in O’Moore Street.
Cormac Street is somewhat unique in the story of Tullamore Street development with its forty houses, two major institutional buildings, a folly and a town park. Rarely is a street preserved without blemish with so many elements over a two-hundred-year period. Cormac Street was also the home of the town’s major property developer and rentier Thomas Acres (d. 1836) who built his Acres Hall in 1786 (now the home of Tullamore Municipal Council). To the earl of Charleville and Thomas Acres is due most of the credit for the transformation of a green field site with Kilcruttin Hill and cemetery to the western side and the Windmill Hill to the east with the terraces in Cormac Street and O’Moore Street. Acres could thank the war with France, 1793–1815, for the boost to the local economy that provided him with tenants for the terrace of houses on the east side. The expansion of Tullamore after 1798 due to the Grand Canal connection with Dublin and the Shannon provided the impetus to secure a new county jail (1826–30), county town status in 1832 and to take effect in 1835 with the completion of the county courthouse. War, politics and pride of place all contributed to the mix. The Bury contribution was rounded off when Alfred (later the fifth earl) got a new railway station at Kilcruttin in place of that at Clonminch in about 1865. Alfred died in 1875 soon after he succeeded his nephew to the earldom.
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