A HISTORY OF STAFFORDSHIRE 



up from 9,874 to 38,179 in the century. Willenhall, the home of lock and 

 key makers, contained, in 1901, 21,438 persons, compared with 3,143 a 

 hundred years ago. Bilston, with a population of 24,034, has more than 

 trebled itself, and the population of Tipton has risen during the same period 

 from 4,280 to 30,543. 



The increase of the population of Tettenhall is only indirectly due to 

 industrial development, as it is now the great residential suburb of Wolver- 

 hampton. The growth of Bushbury, however, another suburb, is accounted 

 for largely by the engineering and electrical works established there. It is 

 worth notice that the district round Wolverhampton has maintained its up- 

 ward movement in population despite the fact that many of the ironworks 

 which formerly employed so many workmen have latterly either been closed, 

 or have migrated to the coast, e.g. to Newport, on account of the heavy 

 cost of freight, a serious item of commercial expenditure at a time when 

 foreign competition in the iron trade becomes increasingly acute. 



Between Bilston and Sedgeley, and again between Walsall and Wolver- 

 hampton, considerable tracts of unsightly mounds and pits mark the sites of 

 mines no longer worked, either because the coal has already been exhausted, 

 or owing to the fact that the mines have become water-logged, and the cost 

 of drainage is too great to allow them to be worked at a profit. The town 

 of Wolverhampton is, however, still famous for the manufacture of tin, 

 japanned, and galvanized goods, whilst other trades such as the manufacture of 

 bicycles and motor cars have grown up during the last thirty years, and given 

 employment to those who have been displaced by the extinction of other 

 industries. 



The case of Cannock is interesting as that of a town which began the 

 nineteenth century with a tiny population of 1,359, which however reached 

 23,974 at the opening of the twentieth, having gained most of its increase 

 since 1851, when coal was first dug on Cannock Chase. 



In the agricultural parts of the county the population has in the main 

 remained stationary or slightly decreased, this decrease being due partly to 

 the inevitable drift of the countryman to industrial centres, and partly to the 

 increase of pasturage and consequent diminution of the demand for agricul- 

 tural labour. In the hundred of Seisdon, with the exception of two or three 

 places, no decrease has taken place at all. In the north division of the 

 hundred of Pirehill there has been none, and the slight decrease in the south 

 division chiefly occurs in villages away from the track of the railways. The 

 same remark applies also to the hundred of Cuttlestone. 



The most sparsely populated, as it is also the most picturesque, region of 

 Staffordshire is that elevated part of the county which comprehends the 

 limestone regions extending for about forty square miles east of the Dove, 

 and the adjoining tract of moorland with its sharp escarpments of millstone 

 grit and its narrow valleys lying between the limestone and the coal measures. 

 It is a district in which railways play little part, and is given up mainly 

 to pastoral farming, carried on with difficulty in the more barren moor- 

 land region, but with greater success in the valleys and on the uplands of the 

 limestone hills, which produce a short sweet grass good for pasturage. There 

 has been some difficulty as to a market in this limestone district, but this 

 should disappear now that the North Staffordshire Railway Company has 



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