LARKHALL

" a Lanarkshire town and quoad sacra parish, chiefly in Dalserf parish, but partly in Hamilton. Standing 320 feet above sea-level, ¼ mile from the right bank of the Avon, 1½ from the left bank of the Clyde, and 3½ miles SSE of Hamilton, the town has a station on the Lesmahagow branch of the Caledonian railway, 61 miles S by E of Holytown. With slight exception it began to be built about 1776, and for 15 or 20 years continued to be only a small village. It then was rapidly extended, chiefly by means of building societies, but is less a town, in the ordinary sense of the word, than an assemblage of villages, hamlets, rows of houses, and isolated dwellings. Its inhabitants are principally miners connected with neighbouring collieries, bleachers, and handloom weavers in the employment of Glasgow manufacturers. A drainage scheme for the district was carried out by the County Council in 1893-94 at an expense of £3500. Larkhall has a post office, with money order, savings bank, and telegraph departments, a branch of the Union Bank, a gaswork, a quoad sacra parish church (1835), renovated and extended in 1889, a Free church, a U.P. church (1836), an Evangelical Union chapel (1876), St Mary's Roman Catholic church (1872), a public library, baths, public halls, bowling club, cemetery, etc. The quoad sacra parish is in the presbytery of Hamilton and synod of Glasgow and Ayr; its minister's stipend is £290. Four public schools - Academy, Duke Street, Glengowan, and Muir Street - and a Roman Catholic school, with respective accommodation for 472, 260, 350, 350, and 212 children, have an average attendance of about 450, 240, 335, 330, and 115, and grants amounting to about £495, £250, £367, £302, and £100. Pop. of town (1861) 2685, (1871) 4971, (1881) 6503, (1891) 8349, of whom 88 were in Hamilton; of q. s. parish (1871) 5332, (1881) 7063, (1891) 8845, of whom 485 were in Hamilton. - Ord. Sur., sh. 23, 1865. "

From Groomes's Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland, 1886