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Oldest extant buildings in Fremantle
The oldest building of any kind is the Round House, 1831.
What is the oldest house in Fremantle?
The Warders Cottages have been dwellings since the early 1850s, but there may be earlier examples.
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Shelley Tonkin says that the shop and two-storey house at 42 Holdsworth Street (above) were built c. 1850. (The shop is/was associated with both Letchfords Aerated Waters and Seuberts Antiques.)
William Jose's grocery and house on the corner of Norfolk Street and Lane is from 1862.
26 Finnerty Street was suggested. It had a shingle roof until recently, but was not built until 1881.
16 Essex Street was built at an unknown date before 1880. Shelley Tonkin points out that could theoretically be as early as 1845, but that the documentation does not go that far back.
All the houses in Nairn Street date from the 1880s.
The oldest school building is the Fremantle Boys School, 1854, in Adelaide Street on what is now the Princess May Reserve. The school was designed by William Ayshford Sanford and was built by convict labour between February 1853 and 1854, with additions in 1910. It was upgraded to a high school in 1947, and closed as a school in 1958, when John Curtin High School opened. It is also known, inter alia, as the Government School.
The oldest building to be used as a school was probably the Rose and Crown Hotel which was on the corner of High and Queen Streets, and was built in 1830. It was the oldest house until it was demolished in 1972.
The oldest hotel building is the Federal Hotel in William Street, 1887.
The first hotel building in Fremantle was the The Stirling Arms - Robert Thomson, licensee, 1 January 1830 - which was on Lot 105, on the NW corner of High and Pakenham Streets.
The oldest church may be St John's, 1882 - which replaced the first St John's (1844).
The first building used for worship was a demountable which the Tranby Methodists brought with them in 1830 and erected in Short Street. The first permanent church building was the 1841 Wesleyan chapel which used to be next to the existing Wesleyan church in Cantonment Street and was probably still extant in the early 20C (tba).
The oldest courthouse building, 1884, is in Marine Terrace, now used by Notre Dame University in relation to Law education. There were two earlier courthouses on Arthur Head.
References and Links
Thanks to Shelley Tonkin for info.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 21 October, 2023 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/oldest.html (it was last updated on 19 March, 2024), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.