K.H. Rogers, in Wiltshire And Somerset Woollen Mills, published by the Pasold Research Fund Ltd., in 1976, noted:
In 1756 Ebenezer Coombs, a clothier, took a copyhold house and garden which was renewed to his son of the same name in 1776. In 1783, he was described as a ‘second and livery clothier’. By 1828, there were extensive buildings and a pond on the site. Ebenezer Coombs died in 1831. It is known that either he or his son, Ebenezer Sperrin Coombs turned for a time to the manufacture of silk, presumably on this site. In 1840 the house occupied by E.S. Coombs and the spacious factory adjoining were offered for sale, held of Lord Bath for two healthy lives, aged 56 and 73. Coombs, the younger of the two lives, died eight days after the auction. The lease could not in fact be sold, either then or when it was again put up in 1845, and fell into hand in 1850. By then the buildings were pulled down.
Ebenezer Coombs (d.1831) also took a lease in 1776 of a cottage and shop at Whitborne Moor. In 1789, a new lease was made to Thomas Down, then described as a shearman but later as a clothier. After his death in 1816, his executors renewed the lease in 1816 and 1834. In a survey of the parish made in 1828, the property was described as a house and silkhouse occupied by Elizabeth Down. In 1836, it was put up for sale as a house and factory, with potential use as a malthouse, occupied by Thomas Down. It was not sold then, but in 1839, the assignment of the lease to a linen-draper from Warminster probably marked the end of trade there. The buildings were still standing in 1876.
These two groups of buildings stood on adjoining sites at Lower Whitborne on the east side of the road leading south from Corsley Heath. The considerable pond on the upstream side of a building probably indicates that water power was used.
WRO, 845, lease books, sale particulars, etc.;
M.F. Davies, Life In An English Village (1909), 45.