National Trust Property Guide - "Englefield", East Maitland, New South Wales, Australia

HUNTER VALLEY HISTORIC HOME
AWAITING A NEW CUSTODIAN!

15 room Georgian residence, expertly restored, retaining stunning period features, cedar timber throughout, original kitchen with wood fired bread oven – utensils and maids quarters, flag floored scullery, 8 working fireplaces, large cellar, elegant formal rooms, wide hallway and striking staircase, modern kitchen with large gas cooker and new main bathroom. 6 x 2 metre workshop, 2 lock up garages and ample off street parking. Size and location present versatile options for use.

The property is classified by the National Trust and is listed on the State Heritage Register.

History
The property now known as Englefield is believed to have been built by ‘Gentleman’ John Smith c. 1837 at Wallis Creek on his Wallis Plains (now Maitland) farm. The land at Wallis Creek was originally ‘granted’ to him (as ‘tenant at will’) by Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1818, being one of the eleven early grants in the area permitting settlement to eleven ‘well-behaved’ people.

Smith was an emancipated convict who was sent to the penal settlement at Sydney, arriving in 1810 on the Indian under the name of James Sidebottom (born 1787 at Manchester), but managed to escape back to England. Then, apparently finding little opportunity there, he got himself into trouble again and was transported a second time, arriving in 1814 on the General Hewitt, under the new name of John Smith and was sent to the Newcastle penal settlement where he confessed his past to Major Morisset, the Commandant (documented in the Bigge Report of 1819-1821).

He was made Chief Constable in Newcastle under Commandants Wallis and Morisset circa 1817 to1823, and in 1818 he was allowed to take up land at Wallis Creek, being formally emancipated in 1819. In 1823 Smith opened the first licensed inn in the Hunter Valley, the Ship Inn in Newcastle, and established the first store in it. He formed an agreement with the Waterloo Company in Sydney for the provision of flour to his store and bought the sloop Elizabeth to trade between Newcastle & Sydney.

During this time he continued to expand his farm at Wallis Creek (and other parts of the Hunter) through grants and acquisition, and employed an overseer to run it, supplying wheat to the Commissariat in Newcastle in return for convict labour. In the 1828 Census, Smith was listed twice: in Newcastle as an innkeeper, and in Maitland as a farmer at Hazelwood of Wallis Plains (together with his wife and their seven children) with a total acreage of 775 (of which 160 was under cultivation), 7 horses, 520 head of cattle and 300 sheep.

Smith continued to expand his business in both locations and other parts of the state. On the 18th August 1837, Governor Sir Richard Bourke ratified Smith’s previous grants at Wallis Creek for around 148 acres (refer original indenture with the house signed by both Smith and his wife Mary) and it was around this time that Smith placed an order for stone window sills consistent with those in the original house now known as Englefield, built on that grant.

It has not yet been established whether Smith used this house as his Maitland residence, but its size and elegance for the period, its location on his farm within walking distance of both his mill (Smith’s Flour Mill, rebuilt as a steam mill in 1844) and his mill workers’ accommodation (Smiths Row, later leased by Caroline Chisholm), suggest that it may have been.

While many failed during the 1840s recession, Smith thrived on the available opportunities "by cashing up" and it was at this time (1st March 1843) that he and Mary sold the property to Henry Adams, innkeeper for one hundred pounds sterling (refer original indenture with the house), who then transferred his license for the Black Horse Inn from 46 Newcastle Street (across the road) to the property on 17th June 1845. It appears that around this time the house underwent extensions and alterations (as above) consistent with its conversion to an inn, which it remained until 1878 when Adam’s sons re-converted it to a private residence and sold it (using the name Englefield for the first time).

In 1856 a private racetrack was established in the paddock to the rear of the house and the first horse races in East Maitland were held there on Queen Victoria’s birthday that year. During the 1870s, when the inn was leased by William Miles (licensee 1864-1877), the Black Horse Inn Races became a local fixture to celebrate special events such as the ‘Anniversary of the Colony’. This was covered extensively in the Maitland Mercury, including the cooking of ‘kale cannon’ a type of Irish stew, in the kitchen at the house.

In 1901 the architectural firm of John W. Pender (architect of Anambah, Cintra and Belltrees) was engaged to carry out restoration work on the property and a detailed specification is held in he Pender archives at Newcastle University.
In 1910 John Hickling bought the property and the Hickling family, who were hay farmers, occupied it until 1968. During the period 1968 to 1986, it fell into disrepair.

In 1986 Peter Gibbs bought the property and received special permission from the then Minister for Planning, Laurie Brereton (who visited the property in 1987) to build a workshop in the grounds for the purpose of restoring the house and conducting a business from there, conserving Australian colonial furniture and building museum copies from old growth Hunter River cedar trees.

During the next twenty years, Englefield went through its second major overhaul (after the 1843 works) to restore the original 1837 fabric and to make sense of the 1843 alterations and additions by adapting it to modern living. In both 1996 and 2006 the re-constructed garden was featured on Australia’s Open Garden Scheme. In February 2005, her Excellency the Governor of NSW, Marie Bashir and Sir Nicholas Shehadie made an official visit to Englefield

Description
Englefield is a two-storey five-bay Georgian house with slender Doric columns to both levels of the verandah and sandstone flagging at ground level. It has six pane double hung sashes without horns and an iron roof with jerkin head gables. It is built of sandstock bricks held together with primitive lime mortar showing shell remnants, reinforced with animal hair. Its original shingle roof survives under the present iron.

The main structural walls are fourteen inches thick with internal paneled reveals. It has six-panelled cedar doors and cedar chimneypieces. There are seven bedrooms, including two attic rooms (in very original condition), and maid’s room over the old kitchen. On the first floor, at the street front, a single room runs the full width of the house, divided into two rooms and a hall by removable cedar floor-to-ceiling paneling incorporating a hinged door leaf.

By virtue of it having a central ceiling rose, fireplaces at each end and a continuous boarded floor, the room architecturally reads as a single space, and may derive from the English model of a large first floor reception room that can be adapted for day-to-day use. (This feature is found in a number of Maitland residences all built around the same time: Wallis House, Roseneath , the Eckford house and outside Maitland most notably at Franklin House in Northern Tasmania.)

It has a cellar, an early kitchen (that appears to pre-date the house, c. 1826) with wood-fired bread oven ( and original hand made door), and back-to-back fireplaces with the adjoining flagged-floor scullery. Most of the lathe and plaster ceilings remain, with original hand run ceiling roses in both the first floor reception room and the downstairs drawing room, the latter also retaining its original hand-run cornice. The house has an unusual architectural feature in that that the front section of the house sits deliberately at an angle to the street front (less than 90 degrees).

This appears to be due to the pre-existence of the kitchen, which may (along with a previous attached timber building) have been built at 90 degrees to a dirt road that had altered when the road was later formalized with stone gutters. A well at the rear of the building collapsed in 1997 (photos remain) and had to be in-filled for safety reasons.

The property consists of four lots (Lots 21-24), the house being on Lot 23. On the other three, a colonial-style garden has been reconstructed on architectural garden remains (including three jacarandas of the 1940s and a more than 100 year old Mulberry), and with loose reference to a garden plan of the 1920/30s (drawn from memory by a member of the family who occupied the property at that time). Original sandstone guttering runs along the opposite side of the street.