On the Sunday evening of 8th June 1856, a child named Harriett Cheeseman, aged seven, met her death, when she fell into a ragstone quarry in Willington Street. Harriet was the daughter of a carpenter, employed by the Earl of Romney. At the front of her father’s house in Willington Street was a quarry, at the edge of which she and other children were playing, at about half past seven. She was trying to catch another child Mary Phipps, when she fell fifteen feet into the quarry. Mary Phipps looked over the edge of the quarry and saw Harriett lying motionless at the bottom. Mr Thomas Parks, a turner of Maidstone, was passing along the road in a pony chaise, when he heard a cry from one of the girls, he immediately got down to the quarry and with a person named Smith, brought the child up.  Mr Parks, then drove for the surgeon Mr William Hoar, who returned with him in the chaise to the scene. Mr Hoar found her in a “state of insensibility” and her skull fractured. She died the following morning at 9 o’clock in the morning, without regaining consciousness.

An inquest was held before T. Kipping on 11th June at the Oak and Ivy Inn, Upper Stone Street, when the case was outlined and the jury returned a verdict of the cause of death as concussion, as a result of the fall. Mr Walker, the steward to the Earl of Romney, stated the Earl would have the site of the accident, securely railed.

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