New exhibition opened in Wilmslow Library: The Bowers. The family that shaped Wilmslow

Some of you must have thought that this blog is now officially defunct and my apologies for making you think that.

But over the last six months, several volunteers of the Wilmslow Community Archaeology and me have been very much working behind the scenes putting together a new exhibition in Wilmslow Library. At times it felt as if we would never manage to get all the research done and then it turned  suddenly into, how much of this will we have to cut, to fit it still all on the boards?

Yesterday evening we finally managed to set it all up and the first visitors made some very nice comments - Thank you, to those who came to the early viewing.

The title of the exhibition is "The Bowers. The family that shaped Wilmslow".

During our years of research in and around Wilmslow, the name of the Bower family kept appearing in the records again and again - usually as one of the people who were able to move events along and change the history of what was when they started a village of about 4000 very dispersed souls.

By the time Ralph Bower the councillor died in 1900, the place had become a very prosperous suburban town at the fringes of Manchester, with a very international outlook on life and business.

The exhibition traces the history of the Bower family over four generations from the first Ralph Bower, who moved from the family farm at Great Warford to Wilmslow and started a spinning mill in a property next to the Parish church, via his sons who developed the family business to a considerable size and that made them into one of the wealthiest families on North Cheshire and Wilmslow into one of the first town in the Northwest to have Gaslighting, to the change of direction in the 1850-1880s away from the manufacturing into property development and the creation of the high-quality houses and neighbourhoods that they built for other businessmen, who were moving into the suburbs.
The family was very much engaged with the local churches and the creation of the schools at St.Bartholomew's and the church and school of St.Anne's in Fulshaw and in the last generation as members and eventually chairman of the newly created Urban District Council.

Tracing the history of the Bower family through the original records of the 18th and 19th century revealed a family that emerged from the local area and remained true to their roots over 150 years and saw a lot of change in Wilmslow parish, a lot of which they had helped to create. The amazing fact is that with this huge importance for the area, they have attracted very little attention in the past, possibly because they were neither titled aristocracy nor did they leave impression industrial structure, but instead an infrastructure framework, without which this town would look very different, whether it is through their generous gifts to local schools and churches, their far-sighted investment in the A34 turnpike or the creation of Grove Street as Wilmslow's shopping and business centre.

The exhibition will be open at Wilmslow Library until Friday 20th October during normal Library opening hours (http://www.cheshireeast.gov.uk/libraries/nearest_library/wilmslow_library/wilmslow_library.aspx) and we hope to use this blog in the coming weeks to add a bit more background information on the family to the story of the exhibition.

Thank you

To Cheshire Libraries and Archives, Ancestry.co.uk, Findmypast, the National Archives, The British Library, St.Bartholomew's Parish, Wilmslow Historical Society and a number of residents in Wilmslow who share their documents and records with us, while we have been researching this exhibition. 

We are very grateful to Mailboxes etc Wilmslow and the Waitrose Community Fund for supporting this project.