The windmill at Preston Brook was constructed by Thomas Brock shortly after his purchase of the manor of Preston Brook in 1769.
Although there were many mills in the district, his choice to build one here was influenced by the coming of the Bridgewater Canal, and his desire to make Preston Brook a center of commerce.
The mill came with a small farm attached to it, and it appears that the whole was let out by Brock, and the mill sublet from the farm.
The mill had a fairly uneventful life, although there are some probably apocryphal tales that it was used occasionally as a meeting place for highwaymen and that smuggled goods coming from Liverpool via the canal were hidden in sacks of flour to be sent on.
The only scandal that is provable is that of the miller John Parker in 1840, who was caught stealing clay off the adjacent wharf with the intention of adulterating the flour. Parker was arrested but escaped back to the mill, spending a month in hiding under the floorboards until he was discovered, rearrested and finally sentenced.
The end of the mill came sometime between 1851 and 1857. A letter to the Warrington Archives dated to the 1970s suggests that the mill burned down around 1850 and requested any information on this, but fire engine records in those archives only cover the Warrington area and so the archives were unable to assist. If a fire did take place, it would not be tended to by Warrington engines as there was a resident engine on the Wharf itself which could be easily dispatched to assist with no records being taken.
The 1861 census does not make any mention of the windmill, but does describe a dwelling at “mill lane” that is occupied by and agricultural labourer named George Lightfoot and his family. This is repeated in 1871 and 1881 (then known as mill cottage), in 1891 (Mill farm), and 1901 (Windmill cottage) which tells us that the smallholding that was attached to the windmill survived intact.
George Lightfoot may have been a relative of the last confirmed miller, Samuel Higginson, whose sister had married one Edward Lightfoot
There is, however, a possibility that the body of the mill itself survived far longer, as the enigmatic “Bill Buttercup”, alias of Will Roads, wrote to the local newspaper in the 1970s recalling his childhood: “The old miller who lived there was Mr Thomas Lightfoot, a nice old gentleman. The mill was set on fire in 1898 at the same time a fine old oak tree in the far grounds was split in two. It was a very bad storm.”
However much of the mill was left, the stables and barns adjacent to it mill were used by Alfred Broome of Windmill Farm (about 500 yards up the road), and were finally demolished in the 1970s to make way for the motorway.
Click here to learn about the millers of Preston Brook Windmill
