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Mill Street
The mill from which Mill-street takes its name was Kingsford's Mill, erected between the Adelphi Hotel [the Parmelia Hotel is now on this site in Mill Street] and Mount's Bay-road by Samuel Kingsford in 1833 to grind the wheat of the earliest settlers. It was not the first mill in Perth; that honour goes to Reveley's Mill, the site of which is marked by a brass tablet in the technical school grounds [James Street].
Kingsford obtained the right to drain the lake (from that time called Lake Kingsford) which occupied the site of the present central railway station and extended from Wellington-street over Roe-street and almost to James-street. In October, 1833, he commenced to cut a drain between this lake and his mill in Mill-street to supply power for the mill.
Kingsford was nothing if not ambitious, for he acquired from the Government the "perpetual right" to drain for the purpose of his mill not only Lake Kingsford, but Lake Irwin (now the railway goods yards), Lake Sutherland (beyond West Perth railway station) and Lake Henderson (now Robertson Park [in Fitzgerald Street]), as well as an option for five years over Monger's Lake and Herdsman's Lake. He called his enterprise the "Perth Mills," and on August, 1839, was advertising flour at 4d. a lb. He died in 1840, and the advent of steam apparently led the mill to cease work shortly afterwards. 'Cygnet' - Cyril Bryan - West Australian 18 February 1939.
References and Links
'Cygnet' - Cyril Bryan - West Australian 18 February 1939.
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 4 June, 2018 and hosted at freotopia.org/streets/mill.html (it was last updated on 18 April, 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.