Ken Rogers in Wiltshire And Somerset Woollen Mills, 1976, writes:
In 1807 William Clare, lord of the manor of Upton Lovell, let the mill there with house and orchard and an extra piece of land to John Gale Everett, who was already working a factory at Heytesbury. The lease, which was for lives, included permission to demolish the mill and build a factory, and the entry fine of £1,300 shows the value with which a water-mill had for a clothier at this time, even when, as here, the water rights were curtailed to his disadvantage by the prior necessity to water a large meadow from 1 November to 1 May. In 1816 Everett bought the factory and the meadow for a further £1,675. In 1822 he bought a 20 h.p. steam-engine from Boulton and Watt. The factory passed to Everett’s “natural and adopted son’ Joseph Butt alias Everett in the same way as his Heytesbury factory.
In 1833, the firm, trading as J.G. and J. Everett, employed 400 hands in and out of the Upton Lovell factory. Steam and water power were used, each of 20 h.p. and there were times in dry seasons or when meadows were being watered, when the machinery was partly stopped. Everett ended his trade in 1846, and the factory was immediately let to the Chippenham firm of Pocock and Rawlings, who were there until about 1858. They were succeeded by a partnership of Henry and St John Hewitt, but, according to Walker, they fell out with their landlords, the Everett family, over politics, and moved their trade to Trowbridge in 1876. J.F. Everett then worked the factory himself for a short time, but was soon succeeded by George Dear, in business until c.1885. In 1882 he was doing well, enlarging his powerloom sheds and fitting a new steam-engine. The factory finally passed in 1886 into the ownership of William Walker who was already running four factories in Trowbridge. He ran it under the title of the Upton Lovell Manufacturing Co. until 1898, when it was damaged by fire. This was the end of the cloth trade in the upper Wylye valley. In Walker’s memoirs he inserted a piece of cloth and wrote “No finer beavers were ever made than those I made at Upton Lovell’. Some part of the building probably remained usable, for there is still in existence a copper plate used for printing the bill-heads of the West of England Leather Cloth Company of Upton Lovell, makers of Regos Leather Cloth for upholstering furniture, the seats of cars, bookbinding, etc.
Nothing now remains of the factory; the only surviving photograph (apart from a distant postcard view) shows the main block of brick. It was L-shaped, one arm of four storeys and one of three storeys plus attics. Both had segment-headed windows without stone frames or mullions. A square stack was attached to the building.
Sources: WRO 682/50 and 828/6; WT 22.7.1882, 15.1.1968, 17.5.1968; Ponting Woollen Industry Of S.W. England, 165.