Dalmellington Iron Company

An Ayrshire iron and coal company built on the ironworks at Waterside (Dunaskin) in the Doon valley, founded by the Houldsworths — the Manchester cotton-manufacturing family who also had the Coltness works in Lanarkshire. Grace's Guide dates the family's establishment of the two ironworks to about 1835 and records fourteen blast furnaces between them by 1860, making some 120,000 tons of pig iron a year; other accounts give the company's founding as 1847. It built a network of mineral railways serving the hilltop mining villages it created, was registered as Dalmellington Iron Co., Ltd on 28 May 1885, and in 1900 sank Houldsworth Colliery near Patna at a cost of £250,000. It went into liquidation in August 1931, when its Ayrshire interests were combined with those of William Baird & Co to form Bairds and Dalmellington Ltd — three-quarters Baird-owned, and controlling some 70 per cent of the Ayrshire coalfield.

Mines operated