Place:Buxton, Derbyshire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Buxton is a spa town in Derbyshire, England. It has the highest elevation – about 1,000 feet (300 m) above sea level – of any market town in England. Close to the county boundary with Cheshire to the west and Staffordshire to the south, Buxton is described as "the gateway to the Peak District National Park". A municipal borough until 1974, Buxton was then merged with other localities lying primarily to the north, including Glossop, to form the local government district and borough of High Peak within the county of Derbyshire. Despite being in the East Midlands, economically Buxton is within the sphere of influence of Greater Manchester. The population of the town was 22,115 at the 2011 Census.

Buxton landmarks include Poole's Cavern, an extensive limestone cavern open to the public, and St Ann's Well, fed by the geothermal spring bottled and sold internationally by Buxton Mineral Water Company. Also in the town is the Buxton Opera House, which hosts several music and theatre festivals each year.

Buxton was originally a chapelry in the ancient parish of Bakewell in the High Peak Hundred of Derbyshire, England. Buxton was made an urban district in 1894 and a municipal borough in 1917.

Spa town boom

Built on the River Wye, and overlooked by Axe Edge Moor, Buxton has a history as a spa town due to its geothermal spring which rises at a constant temperature of 28 °C. The spring waters are piped to St Ann's Well (a shrine to St. Anne since medieval times) at the foot of The Slopes, opposite the Crescent near the town centre. The well was declared to be one of the "Seven Wonders of the Peak" by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his 1636 book De Mirabilibus Pecci: Being The Wonders of the Peak in Darby-shire.

The Dukes of Devonshire have been closely involved with Buxton since 1780, when William Cavendish, the 5th Duke used the profits from his copper mines to develop the town as a spa in the style of Bath. Bess of Hardwick (1527-1608) had taken one of her four husbands, the Earl of Shrewsbury (d. 1590), to "take the waters" at Buxton shortly after he became the gaoler of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1569, and they took Mary there in 1573. She called Buxton "La Fontagne de Bogsby", and stayed at the site of the Old Hall Hotel. The area features in the poetry of W. H. Auden (1907-1973) and the novels of Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Emily Brontë (1818-1848).

Instrumental in the popularity of Buxton was the recommendation by Erasmus Darwin of the waters at Buxton and Matlock to Josiah Wedgwood I (1730-1795). The Wedgwood family often went to Buxton on holiday and recommended the area to their friends. Two of Charles Darwin's half-cousins, Edward Levett Darwin and Reginald Darwin, settled there. The arrival of the railway in 1863 stimulated the town's growth: the population of 1,800 in 1861 had grown to over 6,000 by 1881.

Research Tips

• Derbyshire Record Office website
• British History Online (Victoria County Histories) does not appear to cover Derbyshire geographically. A History of the County of Derby: Volume 2, edited by William Page is a part-volume covering the religious houses of the county. No further volumes have been found.
• GENUKI main page for Derbyshire which provides information on various topics covering the whole of the county, and also a link to a list of parishes. Under each parish there is a list of the settlements within it and brief description of each. This is a list of pre-1834 ancient or ecclesiastical parishes but there are suggestions as to how to find parishes set up since then. GENUKI provides references to other organizations who hold genealogical information for the local area. There is no guarantee that the website has been kept up to date and therefore the reader should check additional sources if possible.
• The FamilyTree Wiki has a series of pages similar to those provided by GENUKI which may have been prepared at a later date and from more recent data. The wiki has a link to English Jurisdictions 1851 which gives the registration district and wapentake for each parish, together with statistics from the 1851 census for the area.
• A Vision of Britain through Time, Derbyshire, section "Units and Statistics" leads to analyses of population and organization of the county from about 1800 through 1974. There are pages available for all civil parishes, municipal boroughs and other administrative divisions. Descriptions provided are usually based on a gazetteer of 1870-72 which often provides brief notes on the economic basis of the settlement and significant occurences through its history.
• For a more detailed view of a specific area try a map from the following selection. The oldest series are very clear at the third magnification offered. Comparing the map details with the GENUKI details for the same area is well worthwhile. Sections of the 1900 map showing parish boundaries only have been reproduced on some (but not all) parish pages here in WeRelate.

• Map of Derbyshire illustrating urban and rural districts in 1900 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown.
• Map of Derbyshire urban and rural districts in 1944 produced by UK Ordnance Survey and provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time. Parish boundaries and settlements within parishes are shown. This is not a repeat of the first map. There were some changes in urban and rural district structure in the 1930s.
• Ordnance Survey map of Derbyshire for 1967 This is the last in this series and was made while Derbyshire was experimenting with the non-metropolitan district structure adopted in 1974. It is a much cleaner map for reading the names of the civil parishes, but the smaller villages are no longer visible.

These are only three of the series of maps to be found in A Vision of Britain through Time.

• Wikimedia Commons map of the post-1974 districts of Derbyshire. The numbers will be linked to the districts on the WeRelate district pages.
• Wikimedia Commons often provides a map of the ancient divisions named "hundreds", but there does not appear to be one for Derbyshire. This 1832 Ordnance Survey map from A Vision of Britain through Time is not as good as those in the Wikimedia Commons series.
• Derbyshire family history societies are listed in GENUKI.
• Towns and Villages of Derbyshire and the Peak District is a locally produced website designed for tourists.