Mountmellick
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Mountmellick Móinteach Mílic
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The southern approach to Mountmellick
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 Mountmellick
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| Coordinates: 53°06′59″N 7°19′27″W / 53.116284°N 7.324104°WCoordinates: 53°06′59″N 7°19′27″W / 53.116284°N 7.324104°W | |
| Country | Ireland |
| Province | Leinster |
| County | County Laois |
| Elevation | 75 m (246 ft) |
| Population (2011) | |
| • Urban | 4,735 |
| Time zone | WET (UTC+0) |
| • Summer (DST) | IST (WEST) (UTC-1) |
| Irish Grid Reference | N449076 |
| Website | www |
Mountmellick or Mountmellic (Irish: Móinteach Mílic) is a town in the north of County Laois, Ireland. It lies on the N80 national secondary road and the R422 and R423 regional roads.
Mountmellick, sometimes spelt Montmellick or Montmellic, is an anglicisation of the Irish name Móinteach Mílic, which means "(the) bog of/by (the) land bordering a river". Older anglicisations include Mointaghmeelick, Montaghmelick, Montiaghmeelick and Monteaghmilick.
The motto translates as "friendship through partnership." The fretted design represents Mountmellick Work, an embroidery craft unique to the town. The bend wavy represents the Owenass river, which embraces much of the town. The crosses reflect the foundation of the town by the Society of Friends or Quakers. These heraldic elements are crosses moline, and derive from the mill-rind, the iron centre of a millstone. They reflect an important Mountmellick industry. The sprigs of andromeda portifolia, or bog rosemary, remind us of the name place, Mointech Milic. Mointeach means "mooreland," reclaimed bogland, and Milic means wetland.
The chief herald of Ireland assigned a coat of arms to Mountmellick Town Commission on 16 December 1998.
Mountmellick was a 15th-century settlement on the narrow Owenass River (River of the Falls in Irish) with an encampment on its banks at Irishtown. Overlooking this valley with its trees and wildlife was a small church called Kilmongan (Ivy Chapel) which was closed by the Penal Laws in 1640.
The Quakers came to the area in 1657 led by William Edmundson. They saw a future for this settlement and built it into a town, which was to grow to eight thousand people, with twenty-seven industries which included breweries, a distillery, woollen mills, cotton, tanneries and glass. It was a boom town in the late 19th century.
One of its earliest Quaker settlers (ca. 1680) was Richard Jackson, who, with his brother Anthony, had been convinced of Quakerism in Eccleston, Lancashire by the missionaries George Fox and Edmundson. Jackson's older brother Anthony settled in Oldcastle in County Meath at about the same time that Jackson and his wife, Margaret Keete, came to Mountmellick. A possible son of Jackson's named Nicholas, who had been born in Lancashire, married an Anne Mann in Mountmellick in about 1702. (Descendants of Nicholas and Anne came to New Garden Township in Chester County Pennsylvania, USA in the 1710s. Nicholas' uncle, Anthony's son Isaac, also emigrated late in life to New Garden township in 1725, and settled in an area the family later called Harmony Grove, just outside present day New Garden. The house his grandson built still stands there, and is a Pennsylvania Historical site as it was used as a way station on the Underground Railroad during the civil war by Jackson descendants. Isaac sired a long line of Quaker families down to William Miller Jones (b. Philadelphia, 1852) who converted to Catholicism and hyphenated his middle and last names as Miller-Jones. His heirs continue to the present day with the Miller-Jones surname.
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