The south-west corner of the intersection of High and Pakenham Streets.
[[../people/curtisanthony.html|Anthony Curtis]] owned this lot from 1832 and established the [[../hotels/stagsheadinn.html|Stag's Head Inn]] there in 1834. He also owned lots 107-110 (to the south, along Pakenham Street), retaining them for almost a quarter of a century.
The Ajax Building, 49-59 High St, architect: John McNeece (part, c. 1908) is on the site on part of which the Stag's Head Inn stood in 1834, on the corner of Pakenham and High Sts. The inn was rebuilt in 1848, and by the 1880s a boarding house, shops and dwellings had also been constructed. The building was sold to John Church, whose company became a substantial enterprise with bulk stores in Pakenham Street.
The present building appears to have been built in two stages: in 1900 and c. 1908—the latter to the design of John McNeece. From 1955 to 1981 it, together with adjoining buildings, was occupied by a furniture retailer, who commissioned internal renovations in 1958 to the design of Eric Moyle.
Hitchcock 1919, writing about 1869 about both lots 106 and 82 (the next one west):
On the opposite corner of Packenham-street where Mr. John Church’s establishment now stands, an auctioneer’s and commission agent’s business was conducted by Mr. T. Corrigan, whose brother Peter, though he drove a baker’s cart for a living, was a man of considerable culture, with whom few could hold their own in a debate on any subject from theology to the differential calculus.
Next to Corrigan’s was a private boarding house, kept by a Mrs. Harford, widow of a shipmaster, who was lost at sea.
Then came the tailor’s shop of the late Mr. George Cooper, at that time one of the keenest sports that ever wielded the willow or stalked the wild duck around the Jandakot lakes.
From Cooper’s a space of vacant land now covered by the Union Stores buildings stretched down to the corner of Henry-street, on which stood Isaac Senior’s noted pie shop – a little wooden structure. Ah, those tasty gravy-laden pies! Perhaps my juvenile palate was keener than now, but methinks their like I have never tasted since. Senior, though a very old man, was the bandmaster and an enthusiastic musician who could extract sweet melody from the most nondescript kind of instruments imaginable. He lived to a great age and was one day found drowned in the river where he must have wandered in his dotage.
References and Links
Fremantle History Centre. Look for the PDFs called:
Purchasers of Fremantle Town Lots 1829-1837
Purchasers of Fremantle Town Lots 1855-1879
Hitchcock, J.K. 1919, [[../books/hitchcock1919.html|'Early Days of Fremantle: High Street 50 Years Ago']], Fremantle Times, one of a series of articles on 'Early Days of Fremantle' publ. 21 March - 20 June 1919.
Tuckfield, Trevor 1971, [[../books/tuckfield.html|'Early colonial inns and taverns']], Early Days: Journal and proceeedings of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, 7, 3: 65-82; Part 2, 7, 7: 98-106.
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 6 December, 2022 and hosted at freotopia.org/lots/106.html (it was last updated on 8 December, 2022), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.