10 March. Fremantle having been declared a municipality, the Town Council meets for the first time at John Thomas's Albert Hotel (later rebuilt and renamed the Commercial and then the Cleopatra Hotel).
Telegraph communication extended to Guildford.
Western Australian Bank opens a branch in Fremantle. Up to that time the only bank operating in Fremantle was the National Bank that stood on the site now occupied by the National Hotel.
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 August, 2015 and hosted at freotopia.org/timeline/1871.html (it was last updated on 19 December, 2018), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.