Lost pub · Street unrecorded
The Woolpack Inn
- Gone
- Closing not recorded
- There now
- Not established. The street was never written down
Known from one story, and a good one. Soon after the 1745 rising a company of Hamburg merchants set up a woollen manufactory in Carlisle under two brothers called Dewlicher, and for a few years it employed people for twenty miles round. Then the elder brother died, the younger married the family's housekeeper, the old overseers were replaced by her relations and acquaintances, and the company failed.
Its stock went at auction for scarcely a quarter of its value, and Dewlicher hid himself in Scotland. Some time later he slipped back into the city late one evening and called at the Woolpack, 'a house much resorted to by the workmen'. It was kept by a widow, Mary Carlyle, who put him up for several days, 'and taking pity on his indigent circumstances, she, at his departure, put something handsome into his pocket'.
He was never seen in Carlisle again. The story is in the account of the city printed in Hutchinson's History of Cumberland in 1794, written by a Carlisle man, R. Longrigg, and its order of events puts Mary Carlyle at the Woolpack around 1750. It does not say where the inn stood. A Woolpack on English Street was pulled down in 1866, and whether that was her house is not known; see the Fish and Dolphin for what else is known of the name. Not the Woolpack on Milbourne Street, built about 1867.
Sources
- W. Hutchinson, The History of the County of Cumberland, vol. II (Carlisle: F. Jollie, 1794), pp. 660-661 and footnote: the Dewlicher manufactory and Mary Carlyle of the Wool-pack-inn
- Carlisle Patriot, 31 August 1866, p. 6: 'Brewster Sessions' (via British Newspaper Archive)
Open question
An unsolved mystery
Where was the Woolpack Inn that the widow Mary Carlyle kept around 1750, 'much resorted to by the workmen' of the city's woollen manufactory? Was it the Woolpack on English Street that was pulled down in 1866?
If you know the answer, or where it might be found (an old photograph, a family story, a document), tell us and it goes into the story above.