22 Ann Street, Gilford, Craigavon, County Down, BT63 6HX

A mid-terrace house forming part of a row of former mill workers' housing on Ann Street, Gilford, built around 1840–1850 and situated east of Gilford Mill, north of the town centre. The property is recorded only and is no longer considered of special interest, having been delisted in November 2013 following extensive alterations that have significantly reduced its architectural and historic fabric.

The house is two bays wide and two storeys tall, square on plan, with a modern two-storey flat-roofed extension to the rear. The roof is pitched and finished in natural slate with angled ridge tiles. There is a rendered chimneystack with clay pots. Rainwater goods are cast-iron ogee-section to the front and uPVC to the rear. External walls are finished in painted ruled-and-lined render. All windows have been replaced with uPVC units.

The principal elevation faces east and has a window at first-floor centre, a replacement half-panelled timber door at ground-floor right, and a window at ground-floor left. The south elevation abuts the adjoining property to that side. The rear (west) elevation has windows at first- and ground-floor right, and is abutted on the left by the modern flat-roofed two-storey return, which also incorporates a timber-sheeted gate enclosing a rear yard; the return itself has a window at each floor level. The north elevation abuts the adjoining property on that side. The building sits on the main road through Gilford as part of a terrace of 25 dwellings on Ann Street (excluding the gatelodge at No. 1). There is vehicular access to the rear, and the site is bounded towards the mill by mature trees.

The house was originally built as part of a back-to-back terrace constructed by the proprietors of the adjacent linen thread spinning mill — initially known as Dunbar and Thompson, later trading as Dunbar McMaster & Co Ltd — which was a hugely successful business largely responsible for the growth and prosperity of Gilford throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The terrace is among the earliest housing built by the company. The arrangement originally consisted of two parallel rows of houses: numbers 9 to 26 fronted onto High Street, while a second row called Bann Street, sharing the back wall of the first row, faced towards the linen mill. The two rows are shown on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, captioned "High Street" and "Bann St[reet]", and a view of the mill said to date from around 1841 — shortly after its completion — shows the rear of the terrace as it then appeared.

The mill itself had its origins in the enterprise of Hugh Dunbar, whose grandfather had leased a property at Huntley from the Whytes of Loughbrickland, where the family had been manufacturing thread and producing linen cloth using hand-loom weavers. By 1834, competition from mill-spun yarns produced by the new wet-spinning process made it necessary for Dunbar to establish his own spinning mill. He chose Gilford as the location 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, and the tail race ran through land belonging to James Uprichard of Bannvale. The mill opened in 1839 as Dunbar and Thompson, Stewart having died in 1837. It was an immediate success, attracting large numbers of workers to the town and prompting rapid population growth: between 1841 and 1851, the population more than quadrupled, from 643 to 2,814. By 1870 the mill employed over 2,000 workers, and the company built 200 houses between 1836 and 1862. All mill-owned houses were inspected monthly, and annually lime-washed, painted and repaired at the firm's expense.

The back-to-back houses 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 a family of four or more. Tenancy records and census returns show considerable mobility within the terrace, with many tenants living at two or more addresses over the years.

The houses are listed in Griffith's Valuation of 1863 as the property of Dunbar McMaster & Co. The High Street houses were all valued at £2 10s and were two storeys, 15 feet long and 12 feet wide. They were noted as "deteriorated by age and not in good repair", suggesting they had been standing for some time by then. The Bann Street houses to the rear were valued at £2 5s, despite being the same dimensions. The first tenants recorded at what is now number 22 (formerly numbered 23) were Joseph Gaddis in the High Street house and William Gullery in the Bann Street house. Later tenants included Sarah McBurney (1902), Joseph Medcalf (1905), Samuel Thompson (1907), James Stingan (1902), John Falconer (1903), and Mary Craig (1904). The 1901 census records the High Street tenant as Jane McBurney, a widow from Armagh whose daughter worked as a spinner at the mill, and the Bann Street tenant as John Falkoner, a garden labourer from Fermanagh living with his wife from Cavan, who worked as a flax preparer. The 1911 census records the High Street tenant as David Hanna, a widower working as a flax sorter, with the Bann Street house unoccupied at that time.

Between 1915 and 1916, most of the Bann Street houses to the rear of the High Street row were incorporated into the front houses. This property and its immediate neighbours at the end of the terrace, however, remained back-to-back dwellings with two separate sets of tenants until the 1930s. The High Street side was subsequently occupied by Robert Lewis until at least 1929, and the Bann Street side by Mary Foster until 1922. The Bann Street portion had been incorporated into the front dwelling by 1937, and the combined house was revalued at £5 in 1938, by which time it was described as a "good type parlour house" consisting of a parlour, kitchen, scullery, and two bedrooms, with the scullery and lavatory accommodated in a rear extension.

The wider story of the mill and its workforce was significantly affected in 1879 when, following the imposition of very high import taxes on linen thread in the United States, Hugh Dunbar McMaster established a mill in Greenwich Village, New York. Workers and machinery were brought over from Ireland and Hugh's brother John was installed as manager. This emigration had a very significant effect on Gilford's population, which halved between 1871 and 1881, and many of the early occupants of these houses are likely to have been among those who emigrated. The Gilford company nonetheless continued to thrive and had 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 the life of the town throughout much of the 20th century, but 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.