The Sartain Family

Of Tin And Troubles

One does not think Malton when one looks at the Sartins. Today the last major tin mining company in Cornwall, Sartin Excavation and Processing is a major local industry with over three thousand employees and a longstanding community legacy that dates back to the 17th century. So why do they have a street in Malton named after them?

The answer lies in the very heart of the Sartin hold on industry- and a chapter of their own they'd like best forgotten.

Upright Citizen

The Sartains were originally a tin mining family in competition with the Tyrleighs for a large chunk of the booming Cornwall tin trade back in the early 17th century. Competition was fierce and it came to a head in the late 1650s or early 1660s (details are somewhat fuzzy) when the Sartains declared open vendetta on the Tyrleighs, driving them out of their claims, all the way to Malton. The trail was lost after the family changed its name to Tynte, and nothing else was thought of it.

Then the lid blew off. In 1803 a member of the Tynte family, while on a stay in Vinetown, discovered critical evidence of the conspiracy and threatened to expose the whole story. The Sartains, now the Sartins, sent one of their close family advisors in to act as the assassin. What they fouled up, however, was that the member making the claim had died two days after doing so in a freakish water polo accident, and had passed the information on to the owner of the Tynte Haberdashery, who promptly locked it in the company safe and forgot about it. The assassin mistakenly began trailing the owner, who was a popular socialite and never alone, and spent three years posing as the neighborhood poster boy before being recalled when the Sartains discovered the mistake.

In 1820, Malton was officially founded, and Vinetown was on the farthest outreach of the city street plan. When asked what they wanted to name a major thoroughfare between a bank and a school, the citizens responded quickly- we need a name that can support the kind of integrity flanking that street, and we can think of none better than that nice young man who lived there for three years.