The families who called Bunkers Hill home
Last updated 05:45, Friday, 19 September 2008
The first major engagement in the American War of Independence was fought on the Charlestown peninsula on June 17, 1775.
A rebel position on Bunker Hill was taken by the British, but with 40 per cent casualties on their side, this was a Pyrrhic victory.
Not everyone took the British side and when the 11th Duke of Norfolk named two farms at Greystoke in the 1780s, Bunkers Hill and Fort Putnam, and a plantation he called Jefferson, this, according to John Martin Robinson, “demonstrated their owner’s support for the rebel colonists and were intended to irritate hostile Tory neighbours”.
The same may have been true when a Carlisle landowner chose the name Bunkers Hill for a house near the city.
Land acquired by John Milbourn on Orton Road, amounting to 74 acres, was passed to his son, also John, in 1770.
No reason was given for the transfer but the site overlooked the city and was an ideal location for a country house.
Having raised £3,000 by mortgaging the land in 1778, John Milbourn would have had enough cash to build a substantial property.
No mention of a house is made in his will when John Milbourn junior died in 1791 aged 46, leaving his Denton Holme estate to his younger sister Lucy Dixon.
As Lucy Milbourn she had married John Dixon and their daughter Margaret married John Lowry, of Durranhill, in June 1792.
In making her will in 1797, just before she died, widow Lucy Dixon bequeathed “my messuage and tenement [meaning a house] at Bunkers Hill in the parish of St Mary to my daughter Margaret, the wife of John Lowry for the term of her natural life.”
So, while John Lowry lived with Margaret at Bunkers Hill he never owned it.
“From here,” stated Jeremy Godwin, “John Lowry conducted his various business ventures; by 1808 he was styled Esq, by 1812 JP.”
In 1811 John had a “Manchester and Glasgow warehouse in English Street”, where he received and despatched goods to and from those two cities.
Margaret Lowry died childless that year leaving her husband free to remarry.
The Carlisle Journal announced in June 1814 the marriage of “John Lowry of Bunkers Hill to Mary Ann Johnston of Moresby House.”
While at Bunkers Hill, John Lowry had been joined by his sister Peggy.
Further details were given in 1888 when a Fisher Street solicitor offered £2 reward for the marriage certificate of “Thomas Chambers, hatter or hat manufacturer, and Margaret Lowry spinster, supposed to have taken place in the early part of the present century.”
She, said the solicitor, “lived at Bunkers Hill, near Carlisle, in 1800, then being 23 years of age”.
Afterwards she “lived near Whitehaven and died at 75 Bostock Street, Liverpool in 1845”, stated the advert.
Having been in financial difficulties since 1803, John Lowry “of Bunkers Hill” was declared bankrupt on June 4 1822.
He was forced to leave the house and the tenancy was taken by one of his creditors, Captain Robert Lowthian RN.
With Commander Lowthian still the tenant in 1832, Bunkers Hill was sold by another John Milbourn to Dr Thomas Barnes.
Lowry died at Moresby in 1846 aged 74 and Commander Lowthian at West Drayton in 1852 aged 79.
Various members of the Barnes family lived at Bunkers Hill, Thomas dying there a year after his wife in 1872.
On the death of John Barnes, their son, in 1891, the estate was divided among his four daughters as co-heiresses, who continued in the house until they married and moved away.
At different dates up to 1903, the daughters made over their share in the property to the tenant John Norman Robinson.
With the death of his young wife Louisa in 1906, JN Robinson sold the household furniture and Walter Sutcliffe was the tenant, still in residence when the property was offered for sale in 1913.
It took some years to sell Bunkers Hill. The contract was signed by Edward Wheatley Pigg, the manager of Teasdale’s sweet factory in December 1916.
From then on locals affectionately named it ‘Pigg Mansion’.
Next to own the property was Mrs Alice Ironside in 1933. Mr Pigg had built a house at Crinkle Hill where he died in 1939.
As well as Mrs Ironside in 1938, Henry Peacock was at Bunkers Hill.
When the house became a listed building in 1957 J Routledge was in residence.
Conversion of the stables and servants’ accommodation allowed three families to live there, one being the Johnstons.
Remarkably, when Dorothy Smithson returned to Carlisle in the 1970s she found her birthplace at Bunkers Hill was for sale and she now lives there, aged 92.
Her maternal grandfather was EW Pigg and who lived in the centre of the house while her parents had the west end before moving to Great Corby.
Fortunately she has deposited some of the deeds at Bunkers Hill in Cumbria Records Office making a complicated history more easily understood.
