FAMILY PLACE NAMES |
There are several places around the country which have been given the name of Hards etc. and although they have been researched by our members, we are sure there is still plenty to uncover about them.
HARDS FARM
Extracts from previous Newsletters.
Issue 2 - June 1985
HARDS FARM West Sussex, lies a few miles south of Horsham on Kerves Lane, at the top
of what was once known as Hards Hill, but is now called Bourne Hill. Unfortunately the original
farmhouse building has been demolished and a modern building now stands on the site. It is a few
hundred yards off Kerves Lane, partially shielded from view by trees and old farm buildings.
Next to these buildings and in front of the farmhouse, stands Hards Farm Cottage the main subject
of our cover picture.
The present owners of the cottage say that the original farmhouse was a Georgian building, while
part of their cottage is several hundred years old. On the other side of Kerves Lane opposite the cottage
and farmhouse, is a small area of woodland known as Hards Wood. It is privately owned but there
is a public footpath crossing it.
Joanna Hards -secretary
HARDS TOWN
Extract from previous Newsletters.
Issue 25 - January 1997
In Southwark in the 1880's there were St George's Roads, Streets, Places, Rows, Markets and the Parish of St George the Martyr. Our first piece of luck came when a lady I had been corresponding with about St George's, found the following in the 1829 settlement indexes for St Mary, Newington: HARDS Richard. About twenty-six years ago he purchased a freehold estate in the parish of *Gillingham, Kent, for £700 which Estate was duly conveyed to him. He afterwards built several houses thereon, and continued to live in the Parish of Gillingham for several years, was rated to, and paid rates and taxes of, the parish, for the house in premises that he occupied.
Cage Lane (1958)
About four years ago he hired a house
in Cage Lane in the same parish, at the yearly rent of £10, occupying and living in the same for about
two years, and paid the rent. No subsequent settlement. Wife: Mary; children: Susan seven years, Eliza
four. Richard fourteen months. 7 Mar 1829 - his mark.
*now in the parish of Chatham.
Diane Savage (Peterborough)
HARDRES STREET - HARDRES ROAD
Extract from previous Newsletters.
Issue 27 - January 1998
In Newsletter 25 Mrs Diane Savage wrote of what she and her sister Mrs Joyce Langley had discovered about Hards Town Chatham, in the course of their researches into their ancestors. Another more recent digression has been an enquiry about Hardres Street in Ramsgate, an address we have wondered about for sometime. "I wrote to the Ramsgate Public Library", writes Diane, "and enclose copies of the information they sent me." This was a street map of Ramsgate today, showing what are now called Hardres Street and Hardres Road, and an extract from C T Richardson's Fragments of History.... Ramsgate 1885, of which this is the revelant paragraph:
I have for long being seeking the origin of the name Hardres as applied to the street, but in vain, nothing but the vaguest suggestions and references being made to the village of Hardres, but no facts produce to connect that place with Ramsgate. Accident however at length helped me, when by the kindness of a friend I found that in 1669 Thomas Hardres, sergent-at-law, was posessed of a considerable tract of land of which the site of this street was part, including also the Ramsgate Farm situated in another part of it and that he in the same year devised the said land to Jane Turner Brown, of Margate. I am without further details, but this already given is sufficient to connect the name with the locality and to suggest the probablility of the adoption of it for the street, and also that of Turner for Turner Street.
Hardres Street, and Turner Street paralled to it, run north eastwards from Ramsgate High Street. Hardres Road continues Hardres Street further in the same direction. The Ramsgate Farm referred to used to be somewhere close to the end of the present Brunswick Street, Which crosses Turmer Street. The area is now wholly built up.
Diane Savage (Peterborough)
HARDS MILL
Extract from previous Newsletters.
Issue 3 - January 1986
There are records of a mill standing at "Dertforde", on an artificial channel of the River Darenth, ever
since the reign of Henry V111. It was occupied and used by a number of different lesses for various different
purposes over some three hundred years until 1787 when it passed from a certain John Loader, at his death, to
his brother William, on condition he rebuilt it, which he did: a large timber-built mill which contained four pairs of stones.
Now in 1762 John and William Loader's sister Mary married John Hards, a local seedsman, born in 1740 and died in 1817. His wife bore him twelve children from 1763 to 1780, and it was their eleventh child, James born in 1778, who inherited the mill at Dartford when his uncle William died in 1810. It was of course from that time that the mill became known as Hards Mill. After George 1V had succeeded to the throne in 1820, James obtained the appointment of royal miller, and was permitted to display the royal arms on the mill building.
James Hards had married Martha Blaze in 1805 and they had four sons and two daughters. It was their youngest son Rrokeby Robinson, born in 1814, to whom the mill passed when his father died in 1838. I due course Rokeby took on a Mr Hills as partener in the business, and the mill became known as Hards snd Hills Mill. The Hards connection seems to have ended about 1886 when the mill was taken over by a firm of millers in nearby Erith, but after another ten years the mill was closed down and remained empty until it was eventually sold with adjoining land, to Burroughs Wellcome & Co. in 1925.
Issue 4 - July 1986
Our last months issue's cover picture of Hards Mill at Dartford in Kent was drawn for us by Joanna, and there is now an interesting postscript to add to the story.
The Erith milling firm which took over from the Hards Family Cannon & Glaze Lltd., a family company, formed in 1882 and run by Stephen Cannon, which operated a large roller mill at Erith, close enough to the Thames for the grain to be supplied by barge. The connection of Hards Mill with Cannon & Glaze is confirmed by a newspaper advertisement of theirs which appeared about 1894. It advertised "Hards Food for Infants & Invalids, Established 1820, as prepared by Jas Hards, Miller to Her Majesty at The Royal Victoria Mill, Dartford".
The Editor