Town lots 383-385

[[../westend/high.html|High Street]], south side of the Mall

For some reason, [[../people/roe.html|Roe]] only planned three lots for what is now the south side of the High Street Mall.

George Lloyd was allocated lots 383 and 384, and J. W. Davey was granted lot 385.

[[../books/erickson.html|Erickson]]:
LLOYD, George, b. 1805, brother of James Lloyd. arr. 12.3.1830 per Warrior. Selected 500 acres Avon District 23.6.1836. Was accompanied by Joseph Morris (brother of Mrs James Lloyd) whom he employed as a carpenter. Dep. 10.1836 per Truelove for N.S.W.
DAV(E)Y, James Wood1ey, b. 7.1.1805 (England), d. 28.10.1852 (York) (of a bolting horse), son of John Davy (a joiner) & Elizabeth (nee Woodley), arr. 13.2.1830 per Egyptian ?with sister Harriet. Granted land at Avon & Cockburn districts. Builder & merchant Fremantle. Chairman of Fremantle Town Trust. His considerable assets c. £13,000 were inherited by his sister Harriet Morrell & a niece & nephew in England.

Manning Chambers are on the eastern corner, on part of lot 385 and all of the rest, lots 384 and 383, is Manning's Buildings, recently renovated. The Majestic Theatre cinema used to be in the middle and its ornamental balconies can still be seen with the initials MT in the ironwork. There are half a dozen shops which are constantly changing tenants with one or two (in 2024) typically vacant.

Hitchcock 1919, describing that part of the street as he recalled it in 1869:
The corner of William-street and High-street was a vacant block, save that right on the south-western boundary there was a row of small cottages known as the ‘Widow’s Home’. They were ramshackle tenements with no exits at the back, and the yard in front strewn with refuse of every description. They were occupied by widows and others too poor to pay more than a nominal rent. Why there should have been any widows when nearly two-thirds of the population were males this deponent knoweth not.
On the next allotment was an octagonal-shaped house of two stories kept by J. Leighton and subsequently by W. Stone as a boarding house, then vacant land to the corner of Market-street. On this corner (now Breckler’s [it was later known as Barney Silbert's Corner]) one Henry Gray, familiarly known as ‘Dapper Gray’, afterwards kept a greengrocer’s shop; the building was characteristic of the times, being constructed of stones without mortar and scarcely high enough for a man to stand up in without touching the roof.

Lot 384 High Street was occupied from March 1873 by William Stone's '[[../hotels/porthotel.html|Port Hotel]]' boarding-house – without a licence to retail liquor. He offered it for lease in September 1873, but continued in the business, the name of which he changed in April 1874 to the Port Temperance Hotel.

Photo of High Street from the first floor of the National Hotel, 1895, with the buildings on Lots 383-385 on the right of the photograph. The building on the left of the photo is [[../buildings/broadway.html|The Broadway]] which is still standing on the corner of Market Street. There are only three lots in that block of High Street between Market and William Streets, and 384 is the middle one, so the Port Hotel building would be the two-storey one with a striped section in the middle of the verandah.

The building on Lot 385 the extreme right of the photograph is the Port Boot Mart run by [[../people/willisgeorge.html|George Willis]], apparently (probably) from 1894 until his death in 1927.

[[../buildings/nixon.html|Nixon Photographer]]'s sign can be seen in William Street, and on the right, in the background, is the wall of the [[../buildings/oddfellows.html|Oddfellows Hall]].

References and Links

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.

Fremantle History Centre. Look for the PDFs called:
Purchasers of Fremantle Town Lots 1829-1837
Purchasers of Fremantle Town Lots 1855-1879

Freotopia

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 7 December, 2022 and hosted at freotopia.org/lots/383-385.html (it was last updated on 11 February, 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.