The story of Patterson's Spade Mill
There has been a mill on this stretch of the Templepatrick river since at least 1770. It ground corn and flax, then made paper, then beetled linen. In 1919 William George Patterson turned it to spades, installing a Leffel double turbine waterwheel in 1920 to drive the hammers. He was at least the fourth generation of his family in the spade-making trade.
Patterson died in 1929, and his sons carried on. The mill's busiest years came in the 1930s and 1940s, when it produced spades, shovels and loys for farms across Ireland and beyond. Where other mills closed, Patterson's kept going on reputation: the quality of the blades kept the orders coming long after demand for hand-forged spades had faded elsewhere.
Commercial production finally ended in 1990, when Robert Patterson, the last of the family to make spades here, died. The family sold the mill and its business. In 1992 the National Trust took it on, repaired the buildings and restored the water turbine over 1993 and 1994.
It opened to the public in 1994 and has run as a working mill ever since. Today it is the last water-driven spade mill still operating in situ in the British Isles, which is why the demonstration you watch is the genuine article and not a reconstruction.