3-011-449 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The house in which George Stephenson was born, at Wylam, near Newcastle, 1864. British engineer Stephenson's birthplace '...is a small red-tiled cottage-one of such as are inhabited by working men in the colliery districts. It is two-storied, and contains four rooms. In one of the lower apartments, the walls unplastered, with the bare joists overhead, and the floor of clay, the father of the locomotive system was born. This house is situated at the eastern extremity of the village of Wylam, a small, poor village on the north bank of the Tyne, surrounded with blast-furnaces, collieries, cinder- banks, and coal-heaps. It was here that George Stephenson passed his childhood, played about beside the waggon-road, went birdnesting, and ran errands to the village; but he did not go to school; his parents were too poor, and bread too dear, to pay even the small amount necessary to send him to school, and so the first eight years of his life were passed. Thirty-five years after, in conjunction with Mr. Edward Pease, he founded the present locomotive manufactory at Newcastle'. From "Illustrated London News", 1864.