Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Heywood

HEYWOOD, a manufacturing town of Lancashire, is situated on the Roch, and on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, 3 miles east of Bury and the same distance south-west of Rochdale. It possesses several handsome churches and chapels, among which may be mentioned St Luke’s church, erected in 1860, with a tall spire and a peal of bells. The other principal buildings are the national school, the mechanics’ institute, the new Conservative club-house, and the market-hall. A new park—the Queen’s Park—purchased and laid out at the cost of £11,000 with money which devolved to Her Majesty in right of her duchy and county palatine of Lancaster, was publicly opened on the 2d of August 1879. Heywood Hall in the neighbourhood of the town was at one time the residence of Peter Heywood, who contributed to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Heywood owes its rise to the enterprise of the Peels, its first manufactures having been introduced by the father of the first Sir Robert Peel. It is an important seat of the cotton manufacture, in connexion with which it has upwards of fifty factories, and there are in addition power-loom factories, iron foundries, boiler-works, and railway waggon works. Coal is wrought extensively in the neighbourhood, The population in 1871 was 21,248.