St Day was the mining centre for Cornwall before Redruth took over the role. St Day has terraces of miners cottages and mine captains villas.
Near St Day at Busveal is Gwennap Pit, a deep hollow, turned into an amphitheater and used regularly by John Wesley. It is still a regular place of pilgrimage for Methodists from all over the world.
St Day was a late medieval pilgrimage and market centre, also St Day servied an established local tin industry in the 16th - 17th centuries, but which had declined by the early 18th century. With the growth of the ‘Copper Kingdom’ in Gwennap from about 1750 onwards, the town entered a period of growth. After setbacks in the Napoleonic Wars period, the early 19th century (especially the 1820s-30s) was a boom period. The mines came right up to the edge of the town, and most miners lived in surrounding hamlets. It was shops, merchants and markets that dominated the town, serving the surrounding mining industry. The population, wealth and activity in the town declined steadily from about 1870 onwards – today there is less population than in 1841.
St Day is, therefore, a relatively unaltered, if not fossilised, example of a boom-time market centre for the richest and perhaps most famous copper mining district in the world – it is now fundamentally a residential village.
The town still possesses an unusual number of shopfronts, although many of the finest and most extravagant have gone,
St Day, Cornwall genealogical information from Genuki