Introduction
The one thing that all of these disparate places had in common were the minerals that lay beneath them: coal, iron ore, limestone, fireclay and sand. The use of these materials for manufacturing during the industrialisation of great Britain was enormous. A factor that gave rise to the name The Black Country.
Even in the medieval period Dudley was the centre of a large area. From Dudley Castle the barons ruled over a sizeable proportion of the West Midlands. The most long lasting of their creations was the Market Town of Dudley itself.
The earliest recorded use of the plentiful mineral supply was also in the middle ages. Later Dud Dudley, an illegitimate son of one of the barons, was one of the first ironmasters to forsake charcoal to use coal (coke) for smelting iron ore. This was taken up by another Dudley man - Abraham Darby who perfected the process in Coalbrookdale.
The industrial history of the area can be experienced in the Black Country Museum which was built on old coal pits and at a junction of the canal system.
Originally the centre of an enormous parish that from the 13th century was occupied by the Premonstratensian order of canons of St Mary's Abbey. The Market Town of Halesowen was close to the crossing of the River Stour and above it soared the tower (and later spire) of the magnificent church of St John the Baptist.
From the 17th century the chief trade was manufacturing nails and other metal objects. During the 17th century Civil War local iron masters supplied the shot to the royalist garrison at Dudley Castle. Only a handful of the traditional Nail and Chain Shops still survive.
William Shenstone, the poet and landscape gardener, was born in the 18th century at the Leasowes, Halesowen. William's natural landscaping techniques turned the streams, woodlands and fields of his farm into a national wonder.
As its name suggests this was a royal estate. The scattered communities of this parish gleaned what they could from an area sandwiched between Pensnett Chase and the Forest of Kinver. The original village centre was close to the Church of St Mary. The Court House (now a Pub) and the Village Pound still stands close by.
The Chase, as a source of minerals and iron-ore deposits, was mined as early as the 13th century. The township of Brierley Hill, Pensnett and Quarry Bank owe their origins to the settlements of miners and charcoal burners within the area.
With the arrival of French glassmakers in the early 17th century Amblecote and Wordsley with Brierley Hill became centres of the Glass Industry. The Red House Cone in Wordsley is the last of the traditional glass works. Some of the finer pieces produced by this trade can be seen at the Broadfield House Glass Museum.
The Market Town of Stourbridge, situated within the parish of Oldswinford, as the name implies, it is located at the river crossing over the River Stour. Wool and leather were its staple trades in the medieval and post-medieval period, but these were quickly overtaken by the iron industry.
The ironmasters, the Foley family, began their rise to fame and fortune in the town. They once lived at The Talbot Hotel, a fine building of the 17th and 18th century. They also founded the Old Swinford Hospital School, which still exists to the present day.
The first locomotive to be run in the United States of America - the Stourbridge Lion and the first to be run in the Midlands, the Agenoria, were manufactured by John Rastrick's Old Foundry in Stourbridge in 1820.
The highest point of this scattered parish is Sedgley Beacon. The village place-name, Gornal - quern corner, suggest that quarrying of the sandstone began well over a thousand years ago. Apart from building stone, the most famous of these were the white sandstone quarries of Ruiton; the sand being used to scatter on floors.
Wrens Nest National Nature Reserve was another kind of quarry - this time limestone, used as a flux in smelting iron ore. The Silurian limestone is well known for being the most fossilarious of all the world's rocks. Many of the fossil species, like the Dudley Bug (calymene blumenbachii) are only found in the Borough.
When the quarries were worked out deep caverns like The Severn Sisters and Dark Cavern, followed the startigraphy into the ground. A subterranean canal system evolved to remove the stone, joining the surface canals of the Black Country. The canal system which cut across the watershed of England included the longest navigable canal in the country, the 18th century Dudley Canal.
