Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History and Guide Arranged Alphabetically by Thomas T. Harman;Walter Showell
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City," from its numerous ironworks, furnaces, and mills. Last year the
citizens numbered over 12,000, the annual output of pig-iron being about 60,000 tons, and the coal mines in the neighbourhood turning out 2,000 tons per day. The city is 240 miles from Nashville, 143 miles from Chattanooga, and 96 miles from Montgomery, all thriving places, and is a central junction of six railways. The climate is good, work plentiful, wages fair, provisions cheap, house rent not dear, churches and schools abundant, and if any of our townsmen are thinking of emigrating they may do a deal worse than go from hence to that other Birmingham, which its own "daily" says is a "City of marvellous wonder and magic growth," &c., &c. ~Birmingham Begging.~--Liberal to others as a rule when in distress, it is on record that once at least the inhabitants of this town were the recipients of like favours at the hands of their fellow-countrymen. In the churchwardens' books of Redenall, Norfolk, under date September 20, 1644, is an entry of 6s. paid "to Richard Herbert, of Birmingham, where was an hundred fifty and five dwelling house burnt by Pr. Rupert." ~Birmingham Borough,~ which is in the hundred of Hemlingford, and wholly in the county of Warwick, includes the parish of Birmingham, part of the parish of Edgbaston, and the hamlets of Deritend-and-Bordesley, and Duddeston-cum-Nechells, in the parish of Aston. The extreme length is six miles one furlong, the average breadth three miles, the circumference twenty-one miles, and the total area 8,420 acres, viz., Birmingham, 2,955; in Edgbaston, 2,512; and in Aston, 2,853. Divided into sixteen wards by an Order in Council, approved by Her Majesty, October 15, 1872. The mean level of Birmingham is reckoned as 443 feet above sea level. |
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