Thing I just learned:
The Ellesmere Canal, for which Ellesmere Port by Liverpool is named, is wholly unconnected to Lord Ellesmere, for whom Ellesmere Island was named in his role as the patron of the Royal Geographical Society. The Earls of Ellesmere were the heirs to a great canal building fortune, the progenitor of which was presumably the richest private citizen in the world during his era and one of the cultural reference points for unfathomable wealth for several decades in English. As one moved counter-clockwise around the park from Buckingham Palace in London, the different branch heirs of this great canal builder owned the first two palatial townhouses (Lancaster House and Bridgewater House) into the 20th century. The next townhouse as one progresses is owned by the Spencer Family in the person of Princess Diana's brother and is leased by the Rothschilds.
The Ellesmere Canal was named for an actual place called Ellesmere along the canal. And Ellesmere Port was then named for the canal. This seems particularly interesting to me as the title "Earl of Ellesmere" was created after the canal was built. So a title was created in 19th century Britain to deal with the social problem of a ridiculously wealthy man failing to inherit a title connected to his inherited fortune, and the title created was the same name as a canal roughly adjacent to the canal that generated his fortune but which neither he nor his canal building family played any part in.
The Duke of Bridgewater built the first hugely successful canal that initially carried coal mined on his lands into Manchester and was eventually extended to connect Manchester to Liverpool and thus the sea. The enormous profits that it produced set off the great speculative canal building frenzy and eventually led to the building of the Erie Canal in the US. The Duke of Bridgewater personally bought the art collection of the Duke of Orleans (assembled by the Regent to Louis XV during his long minority) during the French Revolution. This was essentially the royal art collection of France and arguably the greatest art collection ever assembled by an individual. One rich private citizen had the money to buy it after the House of Commons refused Pitt the Younger's budget request for the British government to do so. When the Duke of Bridgewater died without a son, his enormously profitable canal company and coal producing estates went to a nephew whose wife was the Countess of Sutherland in her own right in Scotland. However, the Duke of Bridgewater stipulated that he wanted his estates to eventually pass to his nephew's third son rather than his first son. While the nephew held this enormous wealth, he was elevated from being the Marquess of Stafford to become the Duke of Sutherland, presumably due to his ludicrous wealth. The income from the Canal paid for the "reform" of his wife's vast estates in Scotland. This was a major part of the truly infamous Highland Clearances. The Sutherland Estates spanned 1.3 million acres when they were sold around World War One (that is a third again larger than the largest cattle ranch in Texas while Texas is three times the size of the UK). Number one son thus inherited the title of Duke of Sutherland and over a million acres of significantly improved land whereas number three son inherited the canal company, its subsequent investments in British railroads, the collieries around Manchester and the art collection. Robert Peel named title-less number three son an earl.
I have always presumed that the Ellesmere Canal had been built by the Bridgewater Canal Company and named along with its terminus for the company's owner.
I also learned that the original Earl of Ellesmere was succeeded in his House of Commons constituency by Lord Palmerston. <insert Barney Gumble reference here>
)
)
)
