Budleigh’s local historians

The Feathers Hotel on Budleigh Salterton's High Street

Fairlynch Museum’s Local History Room is a favourite with our many visitors to Budleigh because of the enormous amount of information carefully gathered over the years by the Museum’s researchers.  Details about local families, planning applications, the history of Budleigh’s schools, the railway... you can spend hours absorbed in learning fascinating facts about the town’s sewerage systems or the local gasworks.

There are of course plenty of local historians working outside the Museum. The Otter Valley Association reports that its OVApedia History section continues to grow, with 150 articles now published online.  At http://www.ovapedia.org.uk/index.php?page=James-Wheaton-born-1808-and-his-two-wives---one-in-Newton-Poppleford-and-one-in-Australia-C19 you can find out about the Newton Poppleford man with two wives. Or, less sensationally in the OVApedia files, about the beekeeping former resident of Lee Ford in Knowle, just a mile or so west of Budleigh Salterton.

The Long Room at The Feathers. Photo courtesy of Tony Jones


One article of interest to the town’s drinkers is a study compiled by Gerald Millington and Roger Lendon of some of the licensees of The Feathers Hotel going back over the years to 1832. No story of bigamists here, though I did note that one of the Feathers’ landlords was illegally married. Find out more at  http://www.ovapedia.org.uk/index.php?page=the-feathers-inn-commercial-hotel-and-some-of-its-licensees-budleigh-salterton-c19-c20

 

An 1890 photo of The Feathers, courtesy of Tony Jones. A record of 1856 notes that the inn had a yard and coach house, stabling for seven horses, a large club room, cellars and a plot of garden ground used as a skittle alley