Dinanagar in Gurdaspur district was a favourite residence of Maharaja Ranjit Singh Ji, who built a garden and a summer establishment there and spent time at it in his later years.
Dhariwal, nearby, holds the New Egerton Woollen Mills, founded in 1880, one of the oldest woollen mills in India and for a century the main industrial employer of the district. The town grew around it and declined with it.
The mill was built to use Punjab and Kashmir wool and to supply army blankets and cloth, and it is a piece of nineteenth-century industrial architecture and organisation that survives in a border district nobody visits.
Gurdaspur district's industrial history is a mill at Dhariwal, foundries at Batala and sugar at Gurdaspur, and all three have contracted.
The reason is the border, and it has been the reason since 1947.
Ranjit Singh Ji built a garden and a residence at Dinanagar and used it as a retreat. What remains of it is fragmentary.
The Dhariwal mill ran for over a century and was among the largest employers in the district. It has been in and out of closure since the 1990s and the mill town around it has emptied.
Batala's foundries made agricultural machinery, lathes and castings and supplied the whole region. The cluster shrank through the 1990s and 2000s and what is left is small units working to order.