Masters Farm

A newspaper report of a fatal accident at the Gunpowder Mills in 1836 mentions Masters Farm;

On Thursday week, about six o’clock in the morning, one of the most dreadful accidents which we have ever had to record, occurred at Shallcross, in the County of Derby, about eight miles from Macclesfield. The powder mills of Messrs Williamson, which contained at the time a ton and a half of gunpowder, blew up with a tremendous explosion.

George Heaps, a married man, with a wife and four children, who was in the mill at the time, was blown a distance of six hundred yards, to his master’s farm at Taxal, in this county, Shallcross being on the border of Cheshire and Derbyshire. He was, of course, quite dead when found.

It’s likely the reporter got his facts wrong (nothing new there!). Rather than “his master’s farm”, it would have been Masters Farm. Click here for more information about the Gunpowder Mills and the accidents which often occurred there.