Digging deep for industry
THE use of slate in the Caernarfonshire area goes back as far as the Roman period.
The fort at Segontium (Caernarfon) originally had a tiled roof which was replaced at a later date with slate.
Some of the floors were made of slate slabs in the fourth century and slate was also used for roofing the eight towers of Conwy Castle between 1283 and 1287.
However it was during the second half of the eighteenth century that the industry began to really develop in the area.
By 1809 slate was being exported from Porth Penrhyn as far as Boston, Massachusetts. Between 1800 and 1840 the population of the quarrying areas doubled in some places and even trebled in others.
Entirely new towns and villages came into existence. One group of non-conformist quarrymen built a chapel close to their working quarters and called it Bethesda after the biblical place.
It became a common practice to name chapels after biblical places and villages such as Carmel, Saron, Nebo and Bethel came into being.
More houses, shops and pubs were built around these chapels and their populations began to swell. By 1881 the parish of Llanllechid, which includes Bethesda, had a population of 8,291 compared to only 1,332 in 1801.
Similarly the parish of Ffes- tiniog had a population of 11,274 in 1881 compared to only 732 in 1801.
During the industrial revolution output began to surge forwards and with private railway companies now developing to connect the quarries with the coast, ports like Porthmadog, Porth Penrhyn and Porth Dinorwig were able to expand.
At the same time slate quarrying had firmly established itself as an industry in the Llanberis area. The total number of workers employed at the Dinorwig Quarry alone had risen from 1,900 in 1843 to 2,850 in 1873.
The original tramway became inadequate and a new line, with a 4ft gauge, was built along the shores of Llyn Padarn. New workshops were built in 1870 for the quarry by the firm of De Winton, Caernarfon, which included an enclosed water wheel to drive all the workshop machinery. There was even a casting furnace for casting and replacing damaged or broken iron parts.
However, a severe depression in the building trade in the 1880s led to a reduced demand for slates.
Commodity prices fell sharply and did not rise again until the Great War.
The outbreak of the Great War led to a decline and saw the closure of many quarries with many men leaving the industry to join the war effort.
Competition was further added to by the development of cheaper concrete tiles. By 1972 the number of people employed in the slate industry had fallen to under 1,000.