BEDROOM: FULLARD

In 1896 Molecey mill was sold for £400 to William Fullard a corn miller, farmer and coal merchant from Thorney. Since Mr Fullard’s death in 1902 the business was taken over by his younger son, Frederick Charles Fullard. Having spent several years in America he returned with his wife, Annie, whom he met and married in San Diego and their daughter Florence born in America in 1888. By the 1911 census Mr and Mrs Fullard were the occupants of the mill and their daughter had married Ernest Witt. In 1919 they baptised their son Richard Fullard Witt in St. Andrew’s church.

Anyone who has ever looked into the history of the fens will have come across the story of the Dutch engineers, headed by Cornelius Vermuyden in the 1630s, who were persuaded to come over to our part of eastern England and employ their know-how in draining the fens. The Witt ancestors were some of these engineers. They settled in England and in the course of time they moved from the King’s Lynn and Thorney area to the very edge of the fenlands, the Deepings. Near the end of the 19th century and with a marriage into the milling Fullard family, the Witts came to live at Molecey Mill, on the Stamford Road, half a mile from Market Deeping but in the parish of West Deeping.