10 Gawler St, Harrowfield’s Cottage (Cloth and Bale)
For much of its long history this cottage has been used as a residence, with a succession of individuals and families either owning or leasing it.
John Rundle (1791-1874) was a Cornish farmer, cattle-trader and butcher. He and his family were among the earliest arrivals in the newly laid-out town of Mount Barker, having emigrated to Adelaide aboard the Java (a notoriously ill-fated voyage that they were lucky to survive) in 1840. Rundle acquired this site from an Adelaide property speculator in 1854, and the cottage was built in about 1857, possibly by the tinsmiths Linde and Fuller, whose business was down the road on the corner of Walker Street. Constructed from local brick, it was exceptionally well-made, and in many respects is little changed today. There is a suggestion of involvement by tinsmiths in the rather eccentric metal chimney-pots, and in the fact that the cottage had a galvanised iron roof, which excited much interest at the time (see 12-14 Gawler St).
A heritage survey carried out in 2004 was enthusiastic about the cottage’s “outstanding level of early brick craftsmanship and design,” and called attention to its “brick walls and detailing, original roof form, raked verandah with timber posts, distinctive chimneys with tall flues, plinth and rendered gable-ends, mid-19th-century lean-to extension to rear, timber-frames to openings, timber multi-paned double-hung sash windows, timber door and timber fanlight.”
The cottage was in the Rundle family for fourteen years but was leased out for most of that time. Tinsmith William Fuller is reputed to have been the first resident. Other early occupants included Frederick Stone (1829-1882), and his wife Annie (née Paterson, 1840-1897). Stone went into partnership with Richard Cornelius in 1859 to form the prominent auction firm of Cornelius & Stone. In the 1870s he established the gracious Parkindula homestead, on land previously owned by Annie’s father, Mount Barker identity Walter Paterson. That property is now the focus of a housing estate on the southern side of Mount Barker.
In 1868 the cottage was bought from Rundle for £30 by Scottish widow Ann Wallace (née Findlay, 1812-1895), who had emigrated to South Australia aboard the Ramilles in 1848 with her husband James. They arrived in Mount Barker in 1852, but James died only two years later at the age of 41, leaving Ann with two young children. James was one of the relatively few people who were laid to rest in the “Triangle,” a small Presbyterian burial ground near the corner of Adelaide Road and Gawler Street.
Unusually, Ann died not remarry, but took a position as a long-term housekeeper for farmer Thomas Lambert. When she moved into “Harrowfield’s” in 1868 her daughter Annie was 19 years old; her son John had left home to get married to Mary Hall at Bugle Ranges. Mother and daughter both lived in the cottage into old age. Ann died in 1895 at home, and Annie died in 1922 shortly after moving into a nursing home. When she moved out there was a poignant clearing sale of their household effects on the site.
Young motor mechanic Thomas O’Donnell bought the cottage when Annie left. He opened a garage complete with bowsers on the adjacent lot, on the Adelaide Road corner. His enterprise only lasted eighteen months, with the combined lot then passing to the Chapman family, who retained it for over fifty years. They initially leased it to Messrs. Martin and Wright for their carpentry business, but in 1925 it reverted to its function as a motor garage, this time under Thomas Brown, who operated Mount Barker Motors Ltd in competition with Gilbert’s garage, which was on the opposite corner. Brown lived in the cottage while running his motor business on the adjacent lot.
The site is known today as “Harrowfield’s cottage,” after Alic John Harrowfield, who leased the cottage with his family between 1950 and 1975. The first Harrowfield to come to the Mount Barker area was Alic’s grandfather, Robert (b. 1827), who emigrated from Wiltshire aboard the Prince Regent in 1849, when 21 years of age. In 1851 he married Elizabeth Siviour (1828-1921), whose family was farming at Nairne, having emigrated aboard the Lysander in 1840. Two weeks after their wedding at Blakiston, Elizabeth gave birth to their baby boy. After a few months Robert left town, purportedly bound for the goldfields of Bendigo.
Elizabeth received one message from Robert three months after his departure, then silence. After advertising in the press for any news of him she eventually gave him up for dead. She remarried in 1856, this time to Frank Jamison (1830-1878), with whom she had another son and moved to Collinsfield in the mid-north. The Harrowfield name was carried on through Elizabeth’s first boy, John Nash Harrowfield (1851-1941), who went on to become the patriarch of a clan based in the Yorke Peninsula, the West Coast and Macclesfield.
Alic Harrowfield (1896-1978) was born at Port Broughton, the eighth of John’s nine children. He intended to be a farmer, but like so many of his generation his life was upended by the outbreak of WWI. He enlisted in the army in 1916 and, as a private in the 48th Battalion he was dispatched abroad in 1917. Although he survived the battlefields of France he was accidentally shot in the right hand in 1918 when loading rifles onto a truck, suffering a “severe compound fracture, right metacarpus.” He was medically discharged, and his injuries must have hampered him considerably when he returned to work as a shearer in South Australia.
In 1933 Alic married Annie (née Humphries 1905-1977), a widow with three children, two boys and a girl. They lived in Kapunda and had two more sons before moving to Mount Barker in about 1940. They died within a year of each other, and their grave in the Mount Barker Cemetery records them as loving parents to all five of their children.
In 1976 the cottage was sold to storekeepers Brian and Betty Menz, and it has been operated as a shop ever since.
The photo on the left below shows the view down Gawler Street in 1865. On the near right is “Harrowfield’s cottage”, with its distinctive chimney pots. A.W. Richardson’s pharmacy is visible on the left beyond the field that would later be the site of Daniel’s blacksmith’s business and “Millie’s Bakery.” The photo on the right shows a parade passing the cottage c. 1918. (Click on photos to enlarge).
