Situated at the north-eastern limit of the Yorkshire coalfield and with land stretching across the wide belt of magnesian limestone that separates the coalfield from the Vale of York, the Gascoigne estate was rich in mineral resources, which the family had exploited extensively since at least 1581. The family has been described by J.T. Ward as ‘energetic industrialists’, ‘businessmen’ and ‘notable colliery developers’ who created a sizeable complex of industries around their mines, comprising brickworks, cokeworks, limekilns, and quar-ries. Throughout their history the family exploited their limestone quarries for agricultural and building purposes, although the mining of coal was their prime concern after agriculture. The colliery viewer John Watson (d.1832) reported in 1819 that on the Gascoigne estates surrounding Parlington and Garforth there were at least ‘4 workable seams discovered’ all of which had been ‘wrought and carried on’ by the Gascoignes ‘for 200 years or upward’. So intense and extensive were the family's interests in the coal industry in the area that Graham S. Hudson has written that ‘the history of coal mining at Garforth is in many ways a history of the Gascoigne family’ itself.

As with their agricultural concerns the Gascoignes were innovative in their exploitation of their mineral resources. This entrepreneurial approach towards the estate's resources was something that Sir Thomas Gascoigne consciously continued. He expanded his industrial assets and, on the advice of leading civil engineers such as John Smeaton (1724–1792) and John Curr, installed new technologies to enhance his efficiency and income. When Sir Thomas died in 1810 he had transformed the collieries into a far different enterprise from that which his forebears had known a hundred years earlier. In 1762 when he inherited the estates from his brother his mineral resources comprised a number of limestone quarries, a small spa known as Clifford or Thorpe Spa near Thorpe Arch, and two collieries, at Barnbow and Garforth, which produced some 51,033 tons of coal.