Hill Family
1780 Anthony Bacon acquired the lease of the Hirwaun Ironworks. Richard Hill was general manager. Hill also worked at Cyfarthfa.
He became Bacon's trusted manager of the Plymouth Ironworks
1784 Elected a burgess of Cardiff.
Married Mary, the sister of Bacon's wife; youngest son Anthony (b. 1784).[1]
1786 Anthony Bacon died. All his natural children were minors, so the estate was placed in the hands of a receiver, William Bacon, who granted a lease of the Plymouth furnace for fifteen and a half years to Richard Hill, during the minority of Thomas Bacon.
Hill entered into an arrangement with Richard Crawshay of Cyfarthfa to supply him with pig iron
1799 Thomas Bacon agreed to surrender all his interest in the Plymouth works to Hill, a decision which was confirmed in 1803
Hill, with his sons, Richard II and John, constructed a tramroad in conjunction with the Dowlais and Penydarren iron companies to the Glamorganshire Canal at Abercynon, the Merthyr Tramroad.
1803 Hill also constructed a tram road for these three companies to bring limestone from the Morlais Castle quarries.
Richard Hill and his son were anxious to improve their business by adding a forge and mills but were very short of capital for such an extension. They obtained an injection of capital from A. Struttle and from Hill's son-in-law, John Nathaniel Miers, to form the Plymouth Forge Company.
1806 Richard Hill died
By 1813 Struttle and Miers had left the business; the three Hill brothers (Richard II, John and Anthony) became partners. They enlarged Plymouth.
1819 Erected the first furnace at Dyffryn
Anthony was very slow in adopting steam-power as the other iron-masters were doing.
1826 John Hill sold out to his brothers.
1835 Anthony Hill, by then owner of the Plymouth Ironworks, asked Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to estimate the cost of building a railway from Merthyr to Cardiff and to Bute Docks, which became the Taff Vale Railway.
1844 Richard died, leaving Anthony as the sole managing director. Gradually he succeeded in paying off the loans and attained great wealth.
1862 Anthony died. After his death the works were sold to Messrs. Fothergill, Hankey and Bateman for £250,000.
c.1880 The works finally closed
See Also
Sources of Information
- ↑ A contributor comments: '...various papers backing up my contention that Richard Hill’s wife’s name was actually Margaret not Mary, and that she was the sister of Anthony Bacon’s mistress Mary Bushby, not his wife’s sister. His wife’s name was Elizabeth. I appreciate that the Dictionary of Welsh Biography gives this wrong information...' JM 2018/07/22
- Welsh Biography Online [1]