Douglastown
Encyclopedia
Douglastown is a hamlet in Kinnettles
Kinnettles
Kinnettles is located in Angus, a Council Area in the northeast of Scotland. The Parish is bounded on the north and east by Forfar, on the southeast and south by Inverarity and the southwest and northwest by Glamis. The centre of the Parish is dominated by the oblong Brigton Hill whose steepest...

 in Angus
Angus
Angus is one of the 32 local government council areas of Scotland, a registration county and a lieutenancy area. The council area borders Aberdeenshire, Perth and Kinross and Dundee City...

, Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...

, three miles south-west of Forfar
Forfar
Forfar is a parish, town and former royal burgh of approximately 13,500 people in Angus, located in the East Central Lowlands of Scotland. Forfar is the county town of Angus, which was officially known as Forfarshire from the 18th century until 1929, when the ancient name was reinstated, and...

. It takes its name from the landowner who in about 1789 provided land for James Ivory & Co. (in which Mr Douglas was a partner) to build a flax mill
Flax mill
Flax mills are mills concerned with the manufacture of flax. The earliest mills were ones for spinning yarn for the linen industry.John Kendrew and Thomas Porthouse , both of Darlington developed the process from Richard Arkwright's water frame, and patented it in 1787...

 to spin yarn for heavy linen cloth called osnabruks (named from the German town of Osnabruk, where it was originally made. The hamlet of Douglastown was built to house the workers. The mill closed in 1834. It used flax-spinning technology invented by John Kendrew
John Kendrew
Sir John Cowdery Kendrew, CBE, FRS was an English biochemist and crystallographer who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Max Perutz; their group in the Cavendish Laboratory investigated the structure of heme-containing proteins.-Biography:He was born in Oxford, son of Wilford George...

 and Thomas Porthouse of Darlington
Darlington
Darlington is a market town in the Borough of Darlington, part of the ceremonial county of County Durham, England. It lies on the small River Skerne, a tributary of the River Tees, not far from the main river. It is the main population centre in the borough, with a population of 97,838 as of 2001...

, patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

ed in 1787.

Further reading

A. J. Wardey, The linen trade: ancient and modern (1864; repr. 1967), 458 511 689-91.
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