George's Notes
Good Friday, 1925, April 10, and the young people of Healey Wesleyan Chapel had been on a ramble to Hart’s Head Pike, where, after a picnic lunch, one of our leaders suggested visiting a “place of some special historic interest quite near” of which he knew.
Accordingly, we made our way to Parkside, Bardsley, and after crossing over a wooden bridge over the River Medlock found ourselves in a garden beside two old cottages, gazing with awe at the ancient beam engine which Thomas Newcomen has erected 150 years earlier for pumping water out of the Parkside Pit: but which for half that time had stood silent and was now overgrown with ivy.
An old man, living in one of the cottages, beside telling us the history, showed our leaders an old calendar on which was a photograph of the engine in fair workable condition.
A few years after our visit I was surprised to learn that the ancient engine had been acquired by Henry Ford, carefully dismantled and shipped to America where it was re-assembled and set up in the Henry Ford Museum, Detroit, Michigan.
George Mainwaring
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/expert-sets/10917/
