In 1860 the discovery of hematite iron ore just outside Millom brought to the area a rush of new settlers, including Norman Nicholson's grandparents. The town had no schools, churches, or streets when his Grandmother Nicholson arrived to join her husband. According to a family story, she so despised what she saw ("ram-shackle furnaces, the grey anthills of slag, the half-made-up roads") that she urged the carter to turn the horse around and take her away. Instead, she remained, bore fourteen sons in the next sixteen years, moved thirty years later from her first home to another just a half-mile up the street, and--though she lived to 1928--never boarded a train. Millom's population reached four thousand by 1875, continued to rise until 1890, and slowly declined during the Depression and World War II. The iron mill imported ore long after it exhausted the local iron mines but finally closed in 1968. The abandoned mines,the mountainous slag pile at the edge of the town, the spire of the sandstone church, the shabby "tin Bethel" chapel of the Nonconformists, the rocky sea coast, the cold becks, and the wall of rugged fells that isolates the coastal strip from the Lake District mark the little mining and steel-mill town.
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