Historical Background: Miners-Style Cottages11-13 Morphett Street, Mount Barker |
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Part Allotment 54 of Section 4477 Hundred of Macclesfield. - Laid Out as the Township of Mount Barker. - Redesignated as Lot 460 in Filed Plan 9985 Prepared by Reg Butler BA, Dip.T. for the Mount Barker District Council 2005. |
Allotment 54
Allotment 54 in the township of Mount Barker is one of the 169 half-acre allotments laid out in the original town plan of 1840. Today, the site is bounded by Walker Street, Morphett Street and Stephens Street; plus a private road made public on 19 July 1979 separating it from Allotment 53.
The land is portion of the Mount Barker Special Survey taken out on 11 January 1839 by WH Dutton, John Finnis and Duncan McFarlane. WH Dutton [refer Additional Comments note 1 below] gained Allotment 54 in the ballot which the partners held for the township land on 2 October 1840. Subsequently, the allotment became the property of Archibald Walker, a Sydney merchant who lent the syndicate the purchase money for the Special Survey. The partners [refer Additional Comments note 2 below] defaulted in their repayments to him.
On 21 March 1853, Archibald Walker, ‘late of Sydney, but now of London’, sold Allotment 54 in Mount Barker, through his Australian attorney, Thomas Walker, a Sydney merchant.
George Crutchett, a Mount Barker tailor and prominent Congregational Church member, bought the property. Born in Devon during 1826, G Crutchett emigrated to South Australia with his wife and infant son aboard the ‘Poictiers’ in 1849. The family had arrived in Mount Barker by the early 1850s and lived in a residence named ‘Adelaide House’. Apparently, George became extremely active in town affairs and mixed easily with the leading citizens.
Along with others of his circle, George Crutchett indulged some property speculation. Real Property Act Application 16498 contains a map of the allotment in 1856 showing a narrow ‘night-cart’ lane stretching the whole length of the boundary with Allotment 53. Neatly kept and landscaped, the lane exists to this day. This evidence suggests that Crutchett intended to build either an uninterrupted row of houses, or else a series of small homes, right along Allotment 54’s road frontage with Morphett Street.
Along the Morphett Street frontage, perhaps Crutchett erected a series of cheap temporary slab dwellings, the ‘Bug Alley’ of local memory mentioned in the 1981 Mount Barker Heritage Survey. As finances permitted, he hoped to replace these with more substantial structures. At this time, the district constantly received many new labourers and other workers, many of them single or newly-married, straight from the emigrant ships; all the new arrivals would need somewhere economical to live until they could afford something better.
On 9 May 1856, Andrew Wood, a Mount Barker carpenter, bought that portion of Allotment 54 abutting Stephens Street. The land deed deposited in Real Property Act Application 12692 regarding this sale indicates that Crutchett parted with 57’ of his Morphett Street frontage to form the new sub-allotment, which ends exactly against the side wall of the survivng cottages. The recently-demolished building on the corner of the allotment did not have the same architectural style as the cottages under study, but the remaining foundations proportions of the two groups of buildings match exactly. Would a test of the two sets of foundations bricks reveal their age to be approximately the same?
Five days after the Wood sale, on 14 May 1856, G Crutchett took out a mortgage with the Mount Barker Land & Investment Society. £240 had to be repaid at a rate of £1 a week. It is likely that he used this money to begin construction of the surviving Morphett Street cottages. Crutchett must have rented out these dwellings, as he sold no further portion of Allotment 54. On 29 October 1858, George borrowed £360 from the South Eastern District Permanent Building Society, probably the Mount Barker Land & Investment Society under a new name. The former company’s forms with the old name crossed out were used.
George Crutchett signed an agreement ‘according to the rules of the Society with power of sale in case of default ... together with all buildings erected thereon’. Structures did indeed exist on Allotment 54 in 1858.
The trustees of the Building Society, John Dunn sen MLC, Frederick May JP and Allan Bell, all prominent Mount Barker citizens of that period, foreclosed on Crutchett’s land at a meeting of the Society held on 10 April 1863.
By further agreement at the same meeting, the Society sold a 27-foot long sub-division of allotment 54 For £48 to Mrs Elizabeth Fuller, a Mount Barker widow. Beginning against Andrew Wood’s boundary line, this distance ends exactly between the two adjoining central doors of the Morphett Street cottages. Such a perfect match would indicate that these dwellings were in existence by 1863. The small portion of the cottage row sold would have been suitable for one person to live in. If not there in the mid-1850s, the premises were there by the early 1860s, nearly twenty years earlier than the date mentioned in the 1981 Mount Barker Heritage Report.
Elizabeth Fuller was the widow of Mount Barker wheelwright Edward Fuller. Husband and wife had emigrated to South Australia aboard the ‘Isabella Watson’ in 1845, the first ship to the colony with assisted migrants since 1840. In 1849, Edward bought Allotments 25 and 26 Township of Mount Barker from the bankrupt original Special Survey estate of John Finnis [refer Additional Comments note 3 below]; plus the eastern portion of Lot 42, just a piece along from Lot 54 on Morphett Street, from flour miller Joseph Jolly in 1855. Unfortunately, Edward Fuller died on Christmas Day 1861, leaving Elizabeth to sell his two Mount Barker properties in 1864 and 1874 respectively; after she had bought the cottage on Allotment 54 in 1863.
The remainder of Allotment 54, which included the rest of the cottage row on the Walker Street end, stayed in the Building Society’s hands until 26 February 1872. At that time, the trustees placed the property under the provisions of the Real Property Act and sold it to Doctor George Bollen, described as a ‘homeopathier’. No doubt until then, the Society had rented out the remaining house under its control to recoup further the financial loss it had suffered through Crutchett’s default. By this time, Crutchett had removed to Moonta, where he was an auctioneer and general agent.
Bollen sub-divided his new property on 15 July 1875. He sold the cottage, together with a portion of the vacant land next to it abutting onto Morphett Street, to Henry Webb, a Two Wells miller. The total length of the purchase along Morphett Street amounted to 66’. On 11 September 1865, Webb had already bought Elizabeth Fuller’s portion of the cottage row, leaving her a life interest in the estate. As yet, no evidence has come to light showing what relationship, if any, existed between H Webb and Mrs Fuller.
In turn, On 13 June 1876, Benjamin Thomas, a Mount Barker farmer and cattle dealer, bought Andrew Wood’s original sub-allotment on the corner of Morphett and Stephens Streets. Thomas followed up this deal with the purchase of Henry Webb’s cottage row (still standing) along Morphett Street on 17 December 1877. At the same time, Dr Bollen (now of Pt Adelaide) sold Thomas over 5’ of Morphett St frontage, taking in the ‘left-hand’ door, with surrounds, of the two central entrances. This strip reaches right back to the ‘night cart’ lane. Was this land originally a narrow public right-of-way to allow Mrs Fuller and the adjoining cottage outdoor access to Morphett St?
Never-the-less, the deal brought up to 71’ the length of cottage and land added to the original 1862 Fuller cottage purchase.
Within a little over a year, Thomas now owned all of the Crutchett pioneer buildings on Allotment 54, which he must have rented out, as he certainly did not live there.
Benjamin Clark Thomas, born c1834, came to Mount Barker from New South Wales in the early 1850s. According to the ‘Mount Barker Courier’ of 14 January 1881, he died of complications following a fall several days previously, after a illness of many years. Death occurred on the morning of 13 January 1881.
BC Thomas married Mary Ann, born c1834 in Co Fermanagh, Ireland. She came to South Australia in 1855, and died 23 July 1900, aged 66. Both Benjamin and Mary Ann are buried at St James’s Blakiston.
The Thomases lived on a property near Mount Barker. They kept dairy cows and grew crops successfully. ‘The Southern Argus’ of 27 March 1879 observed:
‘The potato crop is now very nearly gathered in ... As an example, I may mention Mr B Thomas, who from a little over two acres of ground gathered about 10 tons of potatoes of a first-rate quality, and some of them weighing 2.25 lbs each.’
Benjamin and Mary Ann Thomas had three children - a bachelor son, John; a spinster daughter, Ann; and a married daughter, Margaret, the wife of William Thomson, a master carpenter who did much reliable work in Queensland and Tasmanian mining settlements during the early 1900s. The Thomsons’ son, Stanley, born in 1895, is still alive in Albany WA.
BC Thomas mixed with socially prominent citizens in Mount Barker and took part in political movements. His executors included AW Richardson, Mount Barker’s popular chemist and John Paltridge, the local auctioneer, whom Benjamin would have come to know through his stock dealings.
It was only in November 1900, nearly twenty years after Benjamin Thomas died, that the executors transferred his property at 11-15 Morphett Street, Mount Barker, to the children. Mrs Thomas had died in July 1900 and no doubt she had a life interest in the cottages.
Margaret, the married daughter, received No 15 Morphett Street. Bachelor John gained the surviving cottages at 11-13 Morphett Street. He had retired from the farm and lived as a printer in Gawler Street, possibly working for the ‘Mount Barker Courier’. JG Thomas became a member of the Mount Barker District Council in 1902 and elected Chairman in July 1921, only shortly before his death in September 1921. The Morphett Street property passed to his sister Ann, who sold it in 1922 to Alfred Patterson, a Mount Barker clerk.
An architectural examination of the side wall of the cottage at No 13 Morphett Street would indicate whether a structure on No 15 had ever joined it. If not, I believe, for the reasons mentioned earlier, that the cottage formerly on No 15 Morphett Street nevertheless contained the same structural design as the surviving cottages.
It is also very likely that the site of the third door up from Stephens Street was a small side yard allowing outdoor access for No 13 to Morphett Street. Given this scenario, Crutchett would have built three small cottages each with a side lane to the left. The No 11 cottage lane was not officially formed, as no further buildings were erected in the row along Morphett Street. Either Henry Webb or Benjamin Thomas could have filled in the yard between No 11 & No 13 with building construction, as the two cottages had returned to the same ownership under these men.
Because the Thomas family did not live in these premises, it is quite possible that railway construction workers did live there before the Mount Barker line was opened in 1883. However, it would not be correct to assume that these homes were built especially for these labourers, as the Heritage Survey asserts; the houses were there long before that date.
No evidence exists from records in the South Australian Lands Titles Office or the General Registry Office either to confirm or deny that a cemetery once existed on Allotment 54.
However, in 1893, EH Hallack, a ‘Register’ reporter, visited Mount Barker and wrote on his interviews with local residents, many of whom would have been alive at the time of the town’s foundation. On pp 80-81 of his book, ‘Our townships, farms and homesteads’, he mentioned while looking at the Mount Barker Hotel (now the Hotel Barker):
‘A little to the west is what used to be called “Dead Men’s row”, where some of the first settlers were buried. Its situation is right in the heart of the present township, and as the allotments there became valuable, this, the first cemetery, was soon closed. Only some twenty odd were buried there. The mounds above them have long since been obliterated, and the old graves are now either covered with cowyards and fowl-houses or with fruit-trees etc’
Allotment 54 lies to the north-west of the Hotel Barker and perhaps it was to this site that townsfolk directed Hallack’s attention. ‘The Register’ rejoiced in the care their reporter took on his assignments; careful examination of his assertions shows that he was not given to exaggeration or confusion. Therefore, the old Mount Barker cemetery would certainly be in the vicinity of, if not right on, Allotment 54.
Moreover, early Mount Barkerites called Crutchett’s cottages ‘Resurrection Row’, perhaps because the community realised that the new buildings had brought a ‘dead’ site to life again. To the more imaginative, the buildings must have appeared as a row of ‘lively tombstones’, fit objects of wicked humour. Mrs Fuller’s narrow cottage block reaching back to the ‘night cart’ lane had all the visual ‘feel’ of a grave.
The 1981 Mount Barker Heritage Report’s reference to ‘Bug Alley’ might just as well have applied to the ‘night cart’ lane by the 1890s. If not attended to, the road would have begun easily to harbour vermin. Hallack’s description suggests scattered surrounds, well below the population Crutchett envisaged for the site, prematurely returned to nature because of his bankruptcy. Even today, spaciousness remains.
As evidence points to the building of the Morphett Street cottages between the mid-1850s-early 1860s, it would be a pity to destroy a surviving piece of Mount Barker’s earliest heritage, erected only two decades after the town’s foundation in 1840. Quite apart from this factor, the cottages lend a pleasant ambiance to the Morphett Street streetscape and ease the unrelieved modernity on the opposite side of the road. Perhaps Council or another local body could consider erecting a memorial cairn on the secluded right-of-way behind Allotment 54, with reference to the pioneer cemetery which was undoubtedly somewhere nearby.
This report has lacked scope to detail fully the interesting identities who have had connection with the Morphett Street cottages over the years. The anecdotal re-creation of these people would provide an undoubted drawcard for walking or vehicular tours of Mount Barker. With sensitive restoration, the cottages themselves would form a gracious remembrance of Mount Barker’s rich past. As Hallack reminded readers in his preface to ‘Our towns...’:
‘Apart from the individual interest attaching to the career of the settlers, their experiences are more closely connected with the rise and progress of South Australian civilisation than are those of any other colonists.’
Hallack understood the significance of the Mount Barker district to South Australia only fifty years after white settlement. How much more important for the present generation to realise that too!
References
- Applications 12067, 16498 and 12692 to bring the whole of Allotment 54 under the provisions of the Real Property Act. These are deposited in the General Registry Office of the SA Lands Department.
- The following corresponding LTO folio/page references to the devolution of Allotment 54 ownership under the Torrens Titles system: 178/110; 180/76; 273/153.
- All entries appertaining to Edward and Elizabeth Fuller contained in the Memorials Index of the Old System Titles, SA Department of Lands.
- SA Trades Directories.
- Indices to the registrations of the SA Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages.
- ‘Mt Barker Courier’ 14/1/1881; 27/7/1900; 9/9/1921.
- ‘Southern Argus’ 27/3/1879.
- Butler, R & Phillips, A ‘Register personal notices: Vol 1 1836-1859’ Adelaide 1989.
- Hallack, EH ‘Our townships, farms & homesteads: southern districts of South Australia’ Adelaide 1892.
- Parsons, R ‘Migrant ships for South Australia 1836-1860’ Adelaide 1988.
- Schmidt, R ‘Mountain upon the plain’ Adelaide 1983.
- Statton, J (Ed) ‘Biographical Index of South Australians 1836-1885’ Vols 1-4 Adelaide 1986.
Additional Comments
The following comments were added to the above document by AM Finnis Feb. 2015.
- Note 1 - Duncan Macfarlane gained Allotment 54 in the ballot, not WH Dutton.
- Note 2 - In this case D Macfarlane defaulted in repayment to A Walker. The partners were individually responsible for their own funding.
- Note 3 - John Finnis did not become bankrupt as stated.
