Stratford-upon-Avon · Warwickshire · England
John Eesley's Old Stratford address — now the Shakespeare Hospice Bookshop
The Old Stratford building where the Eesleys lived after John Eesley moved his family across the county line from Hanwell — and the address John F. Eesley left from when he boarded the ship for America. Today the building houses the Shakespeare Hospice Bookshop.
Why this place matters
This is the family's *last English address*. The 1851 census placed John Eesley (51, journeyman miller) and Susan Babbs (50, working) at Rother Street, Old Stratford. From that address one of their sons — John F. — sailed to America and would eventually found the Sunshine Flour Mill in Plainwell, Michigan. Albert Robert, his brother, would soon follow in a different direction, to the Goldie mill in Scotland. The Old Stratford house is the launching point of the family's two-way Atlantic crossing.
Across generations
Chuck and Lijie at the building during their England research trip. The shopfront now reads 'The Shakespeare Hospice Bookshop' — a charity bookshop, hospice-affiliated, in the old building.
Alignment: No prior family photograph of this address survives in the archive; Chuck's frame is the family's first. A historical photograph of the same façade from the 19th century would close the loop, if one ever turns up.
The volunteer at the Oxford library worked out, from parish registers and the 1851 census, that the Eesleys had crossed from Hanwell, Oxfordshire into Old Stratford in Warwickshire. The miller’s household was at Rother Street, where the 1851 census-taker found John Eesley (51), Susan (50), and three sons still at home — William 17, Albert 11, Henry 8 — plus a granddaughter Jane.
From this address, in the decades that followed, the family forked. John F. went west, to America, to a Michigan town where he would buy a roller rink, convert it into a flour mill, and write the Eesley name onto the National Register of Historic Places. Albert Robert went north, to Scotland, into the Goldie mill — and from there, his children’s children would also end up in America, via Marietta, via Stanford, in the present generation.
So this small Warwickshire building — now selling secondhand books to support a hospice — is where the family’s two-way Atlantic crossing began.