Edwardsville
Edwardsville is the modern name of a small urban
area near Treharris and
Quakers Yard. The
termination ‘-ville’ was very popular in the nineteenth century,
suggesting ‘village’ as well as the French ‘ville’ (town) and, at
the same time, indicating a new kind of modern settlement. Another
local name with this ending is Nixonville. Howard C Jones, Place
Names in Glamorgan, p. 25, gives full details regarding the
name. Mrs C M Williams of Grove House, Edwardsville, wrote: My
late father, Mr A Clarke, was in the meeting held in the Long Room
of the Great Western Hotel when Edwardsville was given its name. It
was called this after the late Mr Edmund Edwards, who was chairman
of the meeting and the proprietor of the Great Western Hotel. He
later became the owner of many properties.
This meeting was held about 1900 and Edwardsville
was first applied to a single street and then used generally to mean
the district above
Quakers
Yard Railway Station.
The large quarry or gap on the summit of the
mountain Daren y Celyn, ( Holly Ridge ), popularly known as
the ‘Giant’s Bite’ supplied stone for the
Edwardsville Viaducts. The small
Quaker’s
Yard Railway Station
on Brunel’s original Taff Vale Railway, 1841, is
all that is left of an impressive railway complex in this area.
Until the mid 1970s, 2 derelict stone viaducts
spanned the River Taff. The first, which opened in 1858,
carried the Newport, Abergavenny and Hereford
Railway across the river, through a mountain tunnel to
Aberdare and the Cynon and Neath Valleys, an
engineering triumph. The second viaduct opened in 1886.
It carried the joint G.W.R. and Rhymney Railway
from Quaker’s Yard northward to Merthyr Tydfil on the
opposite side of the valley, along much of the
route taken by the new A470 Trunk Road, 1985.
There were a number of important schools here,
The Quakers Yard Grammar School was opened here in 1922, the
Mining Institute, 1929 and the Quakers Yard
Technical School, 1937. The early Grammar School, 1922, met the
demand for secondary education after WWI. It was housed in 13 huts
purchased by the Merthyr Tydfil C.B.C. from the army camp on
Salisbury Plain for £1300. The Mining Institute
was financed by a levy of 1 penny per ton of coal
dug by miners at the local colleries. A great number of miners and
mining engineers attended classes at this institute for many years.
Both the Quaker’s Yard Grammar School and the Technical School
produced many able pupils, including John A. Owen, who was the last
manager of the Dowlais Works. Both schools amalgamated in 1956 into
one school, which closed in 1967. The school was replaced by a
modern comprehensive school in Troedyrhiw, Afon Taff. Here was also
the so called
’Truant
School’ or South Wales and Monmouthshire Training School. This
was built in 1895 for young boys who were not attending school and
had become a problem on the streets. The youths came here from a
wide radius and it was something of an old fashioned borstal,
although parents had to pay part of the cost of a boy staying here.
There is now a modern and well thought of junior school near to the
former site of these schools, Edwardsville Junior School.
Old maps gave the earlier farm at Edwardsville as
Tir Ffawyddog, meaning ‘Beechy Land’. Hence the cemetery here is
named Beechgrove which opened in 1888. On 27th October 1913 a
tornado struck the area
and the farm, then called Beech Grove Farm, was badly damaged. One
of the most interesting features in the area was an open air
swimming pool built in 1937 to encourage fitness and fresh air, the
Edwardsville Open-Air Baths. It was converted into a modern covered
baths in 1986, but sadly suffered from subsidence in more recent
years.
