In 1877 this site was bought by James Trego Williams (1836-1903), previously manager of the National Bank at Gawler.  Williams may have acquired it for a commercial office, having gone into partnership with Francis Cornelius (1849-1896).  He supplanted Frederick Stone, Cornelius’s previous associate.  Like Cornelius & Stone before them, Cornelius & Williams were auctioneers and stock and land agents, and they also owned sheep stations around Mount Barker.  The two firms were famous for their colourful stock auctions that took place in the Gray’s Inn saleyards in Gawler Street on the last Saturday of every month.  These began in 1859 and were conducted without a single break for the next 35 years. This tradition was revived in the same location in 1910 by the stock and station agency Bennett & Fisher Ltd, which conducted weekly and fortnightly auctions until 1979.  In 1887, after Cornelius and Williams suffered some “financial reversals,” Williams left the firm and moved to Adelaide.

The site was purchased by William Henry Rundle (1842-1888). He belonged to the third generation of the Rundle family who featured so prominently in the early history of Mount Barker, being a grandson of John Rundle (1791-1874) and a son of town butcher William Rundle (1819-1884). Many of his relations stayed in the district, but William Henry chose a more exotic path, working with the British administration in “British Burmah, India.”  In 1871 he was joined there by Amelia Maria Starling (1847-1881), daughter of Mount Barker shopkeeper Louisa Starling, and they were married in Rangoon.  In 1880 Rundle, who had been working as a jailor in Moulmein (now Mawlamyine, a city in Myanmar), was appointed to the position of Head Jailor at Rangoon Jail. At the time this was one of the biggest jails in Burma, with more than 2,000 inmates. Rundle’s task was not made easier by the death of Amelia the following year from cholera, aged 34 years (see also 31 Gawler St and 68 Gawler St).

Rundle was on a brief visit to Mount Barker in 1888 when he bought this site, suggesting that perhaps he was considering a move back home.  Within three months, however, he had died suddenly back in India, aged 46. Although he had at least one surviving child, he left the Gawler Street property to “David Sinclair MD Inspector General of Prisons, Burma India.”  His oldest son, William, was to die twenty years later “through exposure,” in Mergin, India, aged 29 years.  The fate of any other progeny is unknown.

Scottish watchmaker Donald Fraser (1854-1900) leased the Gawler Street site in the late 1890s, but he succumbed to ill-health in 1900. Dr. Sinclair sold the site to Lawrence Wright Carr (1864-1932) who advertised as a carpenter, builder, ironmonger, grocer and undertaker. Carr had already been in retail business for ten years further up Gawler Street (next to A.W. Richardson’s chemist shop), where his comprehensive services had included a refreshment room supplying tea, coffee and cocoa, “obtainable at all hours.” He carried on the same range of services, minus the café, at this site, remaining for seven years.  In 1907 he moved to different premises (now 37 Gawler Street).

The incoming proprietor was the improbably-named Methuselah Prisk Tregoning (1878-1916), a trained chemist. He had worked in Adelaide Hospital and Broken Hill before opening a shop in Mount Barker in 1904.  Now he had a plan to open a thoroughly up-to-date dispensary in Gawler Street, and fortunately he had experienced carpenter L.W. Carr on hand to carry out a major renovation.

The two-storey section of the building, completed in 1907, was touted as one of the most important of its kind south of Adelaide:

[I]n addition to being conveniently fitted [the shop] is lighted with acetylene gas, connected by telephone with surrounding towns and the city, and is replete with a very large assortment of the purest drugs, chemicals &c., necessary in a modern dispensary. 

The shop also offered dental, optical and veterinary services, as well as the usual range of books, stationery, confectionary and tobacco. The building itself was greeted with enthusiasm by The Courier, which complimented its “very attractive appearance” at “one of the most conspicuous business sites in the street.”

Tregoning’s own daughter was born in the dispensary in 1908, but in 1909 he moved on, handing the dipensary over to the Wilkinson family of chemists.  He died in 1916, aged just 38.

The building has functioned as a pharmacy ever since. While the double-storey section was completely rebuilt by Tregoning/Carr, the small single-storey section, on the right as viewed from the street, retains some of the fabric of the original buildings.

The first picture below is taken from a Courier article that appeared on October 11, 1907, announcing the opening of Tregoning’s new dispensary.  The second picture is the streetscape in 1909, with the dispensary on the right (click on photos to enlarge).