CPHT - Prominent Homes

Prominent Homes

Directions to next sign

Retrace your steps South along the footpath until you reach the Mumurimina People sign. Then proceed east along the path that runs to the right hand side of the creek. You will be walking towards Mockridge Road. When you reach the road, turn right and the Between the Hills and the Bay sign is in front of Bayview Secondary College.

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The passing years, and particularly 1967 when bushfires swept through the district, have taken their toll on some of the houses that were once prominent.

Oakleigh

This late Victorian house, Oakleigh, was a four bedroom weatherboard house, with high ceilings and multiple fireplaces. It was destroyed in the 1967 bushfires.

Bayview

Built in the 1840s, the substantially built stone and brick building had 14 spacious rooms. There was a great stairway leading up to a huge school room which over the years was used for concerts, balls, parties and dances. It was destroyed in the 1967 bushfires.

Clarendon

The site where Daniel Stanfield had built an early home was an extensive homestead by the twentieth century. There was a two storey wooden house, a stable, outbuildings and a 50 foot well. The house incorporated a beam which was 50 feet long by 18 inches square. It was totally destroyed in the 1967 bushfires.

Belmont Lawn

This two-story brick building operated as a licenced hotel, ‘The Currier and His Beam’ in the 1830s. By the 1860s the Morrisbys referred to their home as ‘Belmont Lawn’ and so presumably the brick building was by then used as a farmhouse. A weatherboard farmhouse was built in the early 1900s and now all that remains of the earlier brick building is a short section of the south west corner. A round brick well with a conical roof is still visible on the property and was constructed in 1935 from bricks reused from the old stables.

Claremont

In its heyday, the homestead included barns, stables, store-rooms, men’s huts, cattle sheds, stockyards, dairy, piggeries and an orchard as well as a brick and stone residence constructed in Dutch Colonial style. The residence, which had been built in the 1830s, was a ruin by 1939, and subsequently demolished.

The Pines

The weatherboard building was built as a parsonage for St Matthew in 1886 and sold by the Church in 1911. It had a drawing room, dining room, larder and kitchen on the ground floor. Upstairs was the minister’s study, five bedrooms and a servant’s room - but the servant’s room could only be accessed by an external ladder. Water was supplied by a large underground tank. The house was destroyed and one of the residents, Mrs Freeman, lost her life in the 1967 fires.

Source: A Verbal history of Rokeby in the twentieth century with an emphasis on the 1967 bushfires compiled by Viv Adnum, p 275.