Station, a jail or Bridewell should also be erected, which was accordingly done in the year 1810, behind the Mid Parish Church, and which was swept away by the construction of the Gourock Railway in 1886. VI. Later Industrial Developments. We should liked to have referred to the Radical riots of 1820, when the jail was mobbed and the prisoners released; to the loss of the steamer "Comet" off Gourock in 1825, when sixty lives were lost; to the Cartsdyke floods in 1815 and again in 1835, caused by the bursting of Beith's Dam; to the nearly successful assassination by shooting of the Town Clerk, and many other interesting local events, but these are not only beyond our scope and limits, but those interested in them will find them duly chronicled in the pages of the Greenock Advertiser, our first local paper, which was started in 1802. At the outset we mentioned as three of the leading factors in the evolution of Greenock, the invention of the steam |