9 Ann Street, Gilford, Banbridge, BT63 6HX

9 Ann Street is a mid-terrace house of around 1840–1850, forming part of a terrace of twenty-five dwellings on Ann Street, Gilford, situated on the main road through the town to the east of Gilford Mill and north of the town centre. The building is recorded only and is no longer considered of special interest, having been delisted in 2013 following extensive alterations that have significantly reduced its architectural and historic character.

The house is two storeys in height and four bays wide, rectangular on plan, with a single-storey flat-roof extension to the rear. The roof is pitched and covered in natural slate with angled ridge tiles and rendered chimneystacks. Rainwater goods are cast-iron half-round section. External walls are finished in painted ruled-and-lined render. Windows throughout are replacement uPVC units set on projecting masonry sills.

The principal elevation faces east and is two windows wide at first floor, with three windows at ground floor and a modern half-panelled timber door positioned to the right. The south elevation abuts the adjoining property to that side, and the north elevation abuts the adjoining property on the other side. To the rear, the west elevation has a window at first floor right, is abutted at ground floor by the flat-roof red-brick return, and is accessed via a half-panelled timber door to the right. The site is bounded toward the mill by mature trees, with vehicular access to the rear.

The current house was originally two separate back-to-back dwellings. It forms part of what appears to be among the earliest housing constructed by the proprietors of Gilford's linen thread spinning mill, the business originally known as Dunbar and Thompson and later as Dunbar McMaster and Co Ltd. The mill itself opened in 1839, having been established when Hugh Dunbar — descended from a linen family, whose grandfather had leased a property at Huntley from the Whyte family of Loughbrickland and had there manufactured thread using hand-loom weavers — found that competition from mill-spun yarns produced by the new wet-spinning process made it necessary to establish his own spinning mill. Dunbar chose Gilford for the enterprise and entered into partnership with William Agnew Stewart and Robert Thompson to raise the necessary capital. Land was obtained from Hugh Law of Woodbank for the mill itself, with the tail race running through land belonging to James Uprichard of Bannvale. Stewart died in 1837 before the mill opened. The mill was an immediate success and drew large numbers of workers to the town: between 1841 and 1851 the population more than quadrupled, from 643 to 2,814, and by 1870 the mill employed over 2,000 workers. The company built 200 houses for its workforce between 1836 and 1862.

The terrace was originally arranged as two rows of back-to-back houses. Numbers 9 to 26, which fronted onto what was then called High Street, shared a back wall with a second row called Bann Street, which faced toward the linen mill. A view of the mill said to date from around 1841 shows the rear of the terrace as it then appeared, and both rows are shown on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, captioned "High Street" and "Bann Street" respectively. The houses were first listed in Griffith's Valuation of 1863. The High Street houses were each valued at £2 10s and measured approximately fifteen feet long by twelve feet wide over two storeys. They were at that point already rated as "deteriorated by age and not in good repair," suggesting they had been standing for some time. The Bann Street houses to the rear were valued slightly lower at £2 5s, although they were the same size. All houses owned by the mill were inspected monthly by the firm's owners, lime-washed annually, and painted and repaired at the firm's expense.

Back-to-back houses of this type in Gilford have been described as "the most basic units available, having only two rooms with single windows at each floor they would have provided rather cramped living space for more than four occupants. The lack of rear doors and windows and the resultant reduction in ventilation was probably less critical in an open site which allowed unlimited circulation of fresh air. They were adequate for single occupation or smaller family units and would have been a considerable improvement on the poorer type of rural dwellings." The houses were often occupied by single people and couples without children, though it was not uncommon for these two-room dwellings to house families of four or more. Valuation records and census returns show considerable mobility among tenants, with many living at two or more different addresses within the terrace over the years.

Number 9 is noted as having been the only house in the terrace not originally built as a back-to-back, owing to its corner position. The first tenant recorded at number 9 is Thomas Hutchinson, followed by William McKeown in 1887. At the time of the 1901 census, the tenant was Eliza Thompson, an unmarried mill worker who shared the house with two other women who also worked at the mill. She was still resident in 1911, by which time she and her boarder worked respectively as a yarn reeler and a yarn drawer. The first tenant recorded at the adjacent number 10 was Mary Fearon, with William McKeown in the corresponding Bann Street house to its rear. Later tenants of those two houses included Robert Callan in 1887, Eliza Smyth in 1902, and Edward McBurney in 1903. In 1901 and 1911, Elizabeth Smith, a widow of no stated profession, lived alone in the High Street house; the corresponding Bann Street house could not be identified in the census records.

The houses to the rear in Bann Street were for the most part incorporated into the front houses in 1915–16, though six of them remained until the 1930s. In 1915, number 9 and its neighbour, the former number 10, were converted into a single house, valued thereafter at £5 10s with a rent of four shillings a week. By 1917 the tenant was John Wright, and no further tenants are recorded up to 1929. The house that had backed onto the rear of number 9 was incorporated into number 8 Ann Street.

Hugh Dunbar, like many mill owners of his era, took his duties as an employer seriously. The mill provided a range of social welfare provision including a medical attendant and a school. In 1879, following the imposition of very high import tariffs on linen thread in the United States, Hugh Dunbar McMaster established a mill in Greenwich Village, New York, bringing workers and machinery over from Ireland and installing his brother John as manager. The emigration of workers from Gilford had a significant effect on the town's population, which halved between 1871 and 1881; many of the early occupants of the terrace are likely to have been part of this movement. Despite this, the company continued to thrive in Gilford and developed a worldwide reputation. The British Trade Journal of 1890 reported that the firm exported "twine for salmon fishing to British Columbia, carpet threads, book-binder's threads, extra strong threads for leather and thick cloths and fine threads for the sewing-machinist and lace maker...to the United States, South and Central America, Brazil, Australia and the rest of the British Colonies." The owners maintained a paternalistic interest in their workers and in the life of the town through much of the 20th century, though a decline in the Ulster linen industry eventually led to the mill's closure in the early 1980s. The building has been retained in use as a dwelling.