At the time of the first census in 1801 the population of Bushbury was only 488 plus a further 369 in Essington, but according to the Poor Relief figures for 1803 four hundred and twenty people, i.e. nearly half the population, were receiving relief of some sort.
The first railway through the parish was the Grand Junction line from Birmingham to Warrington. It entered the parish near Showell Manor in the south, and much of its original construction can still be seen, particularly the bridges over Showell Road, Bee Lane and Greenfield Lane. The end of Church Road was turned into Three Tuns Lane to obviate the need for an extra bridge, but the old fork in the road can still be seen at the bottom of Elston Hall Lane.
When the 20th century opened most of the population at the western end of Bushbury earned their living either from employment by the railway companies or the Electric Construction Company, and the centre of life in the parish was established at the junction of Bushbury Lane and Stafford Road. A service of trams from here into Wolverhampton was started in 1905, and by 1912 the railway passenger service from Bushbury was little used and the station was closed.
Soon before the war started another factory had been established at Oxley on the Stafford Road. Messrs. Macfarlane and Robinson built a plant for the production of enamel hollowware, which was used during the war for shell inspection, but it did not survive the early post-war depression and closed in 1926. The premises were bought by the Goodyear Tyre and Rubber Company in 1927, an enterprise which continued to expand until it employed 1700 people in 1939.
The effect of the Great War on the parish can best be illustrated by the War Memorial in the Parish Church, although it seems unlikely that the names listed there are the total number of men from the parish who died.
Near the eastern end of the parish, the sinking of the new Hilton Main Colliery in Shareshill parish, which started in December 1919, provided work for many Essington men, and by the time the Holly Bank Colliery closed in 1927, most of its employees found work at Hilton Main, which survived with a change of ownership in 1932, to be nationalised after the Second World War and finally closed only in 1969.
The greatest change of the 1920s was the building of the Low Hill estate of council houses in the parish. 101 acres of land were purchased from the Showell Estate and a further 232 acres from the Low Hill Bushbury Estate Company. Low Hill House, and later Showell Farm were demolished, and by 1927 nearly 2000 houses had been built by various contractors for Wolverhampton Corporation. A complete new road system was laid down obliterating the old bridleways which had linked Showell Farm, Low Hill House, Bushbury Hill Farm and Oldfallings.
(www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/articles/bushbury)
The Parish Church
The Parish Church, dedicated to the assumption of the Blessed Virgin (St Mary), is an ancient building, surmounted by an embattled tower, and formerly belonged to the priory of St Thomas, near Stafford. It has many monuments to the families of Byshbury, Moseley, Huntbach, Hellier, Leacroft, Whitgreave, Gough, and Huskisson, the latter of whom possessed the Oxley estate until 1793. (History, Gazetteer and Directory of Staffordshire, William White, Sheffield, 1851)
The parish registers of the church of St Mary commence in 1764. The original registers for the period 1789-1908 (Bapts & Bur) and 1764-1906 (Mar), and Banns for the period 1764-1823 are deposited at Staffordshire Record Office. Earlier registers were destroyed prior to 1831. (www.genuki.org.uk)
By the early 1920s the population of the parish had grown to such an extent that the old ecclesiastical parish of 'Bushbury with Essington' was far too large, and it was therefore divided. A new church of St. John the Evangelist was built at Essington and consecrated in 1933. St. Aidan's Mission Room at Newtown had been opened in 1931.
Also in Bushbury parish itself, new church accommodation was urgently needed for the ever expanding population. In 1929 the Mission of the Good Shepherd was built in Second Avenue in Low Hill. A timber framed building clad with asbestos, it did sterling service both as church and mission room for social occasions until it was destroyed by fire in 1946.
In 1932 the Church of the Epiphany was built on Stafford Road at Oxley, and another separate parish established out of the area served by the mother church.
(www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/articles/bushbury)
In 1967 a mission/ district church of Bushbury was built, dedicated to St James, located in Taunton Avenue, Fordhouses.
Wolverhampton Archives - newly located in the recently restored Molineux Hotel, have microfilm copies of the burial registers of Bushbury Cemetery, Underhill Lane, for the period 1949-1989.
To discover more about the historic objects and documents cared for by Museums and Archives in the Black Country log onto the Black Country History website.