SCARCELY any trace remains of the Darlington textile industry, but in its time it employed thousands of local people. It survived against all the odds into the 20th Century - particularly surprising, as it was so far from the other textile districts.

The industry owed its long life in Darlington to a series of happy coincidences. In the 18th Century, it produced an unlikely innovator whose machine injected new vitality into the linen industry. In the 19th, the town's main employer of women, the Peases, chose to carry on when economics was telling them it made sense to pull out of textiles. And in the 20th, Darlington benefited because it could offer a large flat site with good communications.

From early times, Darlington people, like those elsewhere in England, were self-sufficient in woollen cloth. This was a coarse, dense type of fabric for clothing and blankets.

Its production died out in the 1700s, but the manufacture of linen grew to replace it, becoming the most important trade in the town and surrounding villages during the 18th Century.

Flax-spinning and linen-weaving are mentioned in local records before 1600, and by the 1700s Darlington and Stockton had a national reputation for huckabacks - high quality linen used for tablecloths and napkins.

People in Hurworth, Neasham, Aycliffe and other villages depended on this employment, and there was a busy trade back and forth to town with out-work from the manufacturers.

The handloom weavers had workshops behind their homes, some of which survived in Hurworth into the 1900s.

The first machine for spinning flax was developed and used in Darlington by John Kendrew, and patented in 1787. It worked, but not well.

It was much improved in Leeds by John Marshall, who went on to make a fortune from it. Kendrew was almost ruined when he unsuccessfully sued Marshall for pirating the design.

However, in Darlington new factories were set up to use Kendrew's machines - Kendrew himself had one at Haughton, his former partner at Coatham Mundeville and Ianson's in Priestgate, which was the last surviving one in the 1820s. The once great Darlington industry could not compete with a new generation of machines developed in Leeds and Barnsley. Kendrew, though, had given it a new lease of life, for a time.

Following the collapse of linen, the Pease family rose to prominence in the worsted trade. Worsted is made from long fibres and is processed quite differently from woollen cloth. It relies on wool combing, which was still carried out by hand in the 1840s. The highly-skilled wool combers worked around charcoal fires in hot sheds and were renowned for their thirst - the evidence comes in pub names around Freeman's Place: the Woolcombers' Arms and the Bishop Blaize, after the combers' patron saint.

Because worsted was largely made by hand, it did not become a factory-based industry. It was made in smaller workshops and so the Pease business was spread around a number of buildings on either side of the Skerne for many years.

Henry Pease and Co Ltd celebrated its bi-centenary in 1952, although I have been unable to find any real evidence that the firm was established in 1752.

Businesses did not always keep detailed records, and any records which did exist have not necessarily survived. It may be that 1752 marks the date when the first Edward Pease went into business with his uncle in the town.

The Pease firm was very outward looking - through necessity, as suppliers and customers were miles away, and journeys of hundreds of miles on horseback were needed to buy wool and sell products, such as yarn, to the Scottish tartan trade.

Eventually, machinery replaced the old hand techniques, and by the 19th Century the Peases employed hundreds of people in their new factories.

The Peases grew to control the industry in Darlington and they concentrated their business on three sites. Low Mill, opposite St Cuthbert's, was their first powered factory. They moved a little later into Priestgate Mill, which would become their main factory. Railway Mill, off Northgate, was used later for weaving by powerloom.

Several times the Peases' textile business hit hard times, and decisions were made to carry on when it may have made better economic sense to wind up and concentrate on railways and collieries.

The Peases persisted partly because, as Quakers, they felt some responsibility towards their employees and because textiles were a good strategic fit with their other interests. Darlington's heavy industry employed only men; the textile factories employed mainly women and children.

Together, textiles and engineering could attract whole families to work in Darlington.

The Peases survived until 1972, but they were overtaken as the largest textile employer soon after the Second World War, by Patons and Baldwin's Ltd. The Patons factory, which opened off McMullen Road in 1947, was a marvel of the age. It operated on the "flow line principle" of production, and was the largest single-storey plant of its type in the world. Patons came to Darlington because its home town of Halifax could not offer a suitably large and flat site. All raw materials came into the factory by rail, and end products left the same way, so Darlington's good communications were another point in its favour. The local council was also delighted to welcome this major employer - at its peak the firm had 3,500 workers, many bussed in from 20 miles around. Most were women. Woollen and synthetic yarns were the main products, and there was also a design department creating knitting patterns.

However, the brave new world of this model factory could not survive the textile recession of the 1970s, which also finished off the Peases' operation. Most of the jobs at Patons, by then Coats Patons, went during that decade, but a small business, now called Coats Crafts UK, still survives on the Lingfield Point site.

l Dr Gill Cookson is editor of the Darlington volume of the Victoria County History. Her work in progress can be seen on the Internet at www.durhampast.net. A fuller history of Darlington's textile industry will soon appear there with new information on Darlington's medieval landscape, by Dr Christine Newman