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| Warrington's Inverleigh Hotel |
The bluestone hotel at Inverleigh was built about the 1860s where the road from Geelong, the Hamilton Highway, crosses the Leigh River. It's still there, still standing sturdily. I photographed it in the 1980s and again last year after it had been purchased by several locals and refurbished. It is now a funky country pub.
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| Inverleigh Hotel c1980 |
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| Inverleigh Hotel 2015 |
The above photos are all in my family album because it was owned for about twenty years by my husband's great-aunt Hannah Warrington and her husband John. I presume John and Hannah are in the first photo but we have no way of proving it.
Hannah ANDREW and John WARRINGTON were married in Huntingdon, England in 1851 and migrated to Geelong, Victoria in January 1853 on the 'Six Sisters'. They lived in Geelong and Mugheboluc near Geelong before moving further west to Ondit. I think they were farming but there is also a record of John working as a mail contractor so he was probably finding work where he could. Hannah's parents and siblings also migrated in the 1850s and by 1856 they were all living in the Inverleigh area.
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| Colac Herald 28 October 1878 |
In 1878 Hannah and John sold up at Ondit and moved to Inverleigh when they took up the licence of the Inverleigh Hotel. The publican's licence was in Hannah's name.
The Warringtons are mentioned several times in the local newspapers over the next twenty years. The first is when their stables were deliberately destroyed, but they are also mentioned in several newspaper reports because they were caught serving alcohol after hours
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| Colac Herald 21 Feb 1882 |
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| Colac Herald, 6 May 1887 |
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| Camperdown Chronicle 1 October 1887 |
Hannah and John had 14 children but only four daughters survived. And only two of those daughters had families of their own but their descendants live in the area today.
Hannah died in 1900 and John in 1901 and the hotel was sold.
This post is in response to the
Sepia Saturday theme photo of Chittenden Hotel in Ohio.
Somehow the first photograph makes the building look larger than it does in the other two photos.
ReplyDeleteI was hoping there would be a story about an Australian hotel. Hoorah! Great gravestone. It's interesting how the windows have changed over the years isn't it? I prefer them unadorned I think.
ReplyDeleteThe most recent update of the Inverleigh Hotel makes it look quite inviting! As to being fined for serving alcohol after hours, the excuse of going to bed & leaving others to do as they would does, indeed, sound like a pretty flimsy excuse. What was the man thinking? :)
ReplyDeleteI think it looks good with that extra verandah.
ReplyDeleteGreat post and lovely pics Lorraine. The hotel does look inviting now. You are lucky that the building was in bluestone and hasn't been modified much or even demolished. Some of my hotelier family members were also fined for serving alcohol out of hours. It seems to have been par for the course for many - at least for their friends and family members.
ReplyDeleteI prefer the old photograph with undecorated windows too, but the verandah looks good. Could be a nice place to stop for lunch some day. A couple of Roger's reatives owned pubs around Yarra Glen but now long gone.
ReplyDeleteI was disappointed to see the veranda had been removed in 1980 and then I was glad to see it returned for present-day customers. It is a handsome and sturdy building, for sure. The defense in the court case was rather amusing but I don't think the judge was amused.
ReplyDeleteWere our families once neighbours ?. If your Warringtons lived in Glatton in the 1850s, my Tanseys came from the next door parish of Caldecote ! I just love your old Australian buildings. They seem just right for the landscape we have.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they knew each other:)
DeleteHannah and her siblings were baptised in Great Gidding, a parish next to Glatton.
There is a small photo on inverleigh.net that appears to show the hotel at a time somewhere between the first two on this page. The original front sided ogee verandah from the first photo here has been replaced by a convex return verandah similar in shape to the current one, although the older one used finer posts and cast iron detailing - a nice counterpoint to the solidity of the bluestone building behind.
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