Kirkpatrick Brothers Linen Mill - Ballyclare - Read Description Below

History. There is surprisingly little available online so what I can find is pieced together from various sources. The original buildings are labelled as ‘mills’ on a 1832 map, then as ‘Ballyclare Bleach Works’ after 1900, gradually increasing in size to the present complex. The arrangement of weirs, sluices and mill ponds suggests that the mill was water-powered at one stage. The Kirkpatrick brothers were involved from 1873 to 1931 and were originally commission-based bleachers, dyers and finishers. They specialised in producing organdie (organdy) - an almost transparent cotton that was made by passing the cloth through a bath of concentrated sulphuric acid. The firm was later sold to the Lancashire Combined Bleachers' Association, then to Whitecroft and then to Flaxall in 1976. By this stage the processing of cloth had stopped and the factory was concentrating on the ‘Linron’ process for bleaching and blending flax fibre with other yarns.