12 Enoggera Road Newmarket

During the 1880s and 1890s, Newmarket was a rural district which was also being established as a middle-class residential suburb.  As the route to the saleyards at Newmarket and the northern towns of Gympie and Kilcoy, Enoggera Road was a busy thoroughfare for both people and stock, and by the 1890s boasted a Wesleyan church, a hotel and several businesses including a wheelwright, blacksmith and butcher. A tannery was established on Ithaca Creek in Free Street in the late 1880s. Residential development at Newmarket was encouraged by the construction of the tramline along Enoggera Road at Kelvin Grove in 1901 which was extended to Newmarket in 1903.

The house is situated on land which was granted to Robert Davidson in 1859 and subdivided from the 1860s onwards. In 1882, Joseph Free bought over 18 acres of this land and Emma Free purchased an allotment of one rood and fifteen perches on the corner of Enoggera Street and Edith Street (now Thurlow Street).  Several other members of the Free family bought neighbouring allotments and settled in this vicinity, giving their name to nearby Free Street.  Members of the Free family who lived in Thurlow Street and Free Street during the 1880s and 1890s included Joseph Free's sons, Joseph Thomas Free, a carpenter, and William Charles Free, a drayman. Joseph Free Senior also had a daughter, Sarah Emma, who married William Worthy Free, and resided in 8 Enoggera Road in an adjacent house.

Available records suggest that the house on the corner of Thurlow Street and Enoggera Road was constructed around in the early 1880s. After the death of Emma Free on 28 October 1885, ownership of her land passed to her widower, Joseph.  In 1896, it was sold to Elizabeth Stewart, wife of Joseph Stewart. The Stewarts sold the house in 1902 to Mary Ann Reuben, wife of Frederick Reuben, who occupied the house in the early 1920s.  The land was subdivided again and the house on 37 perches sold in 1932 to John Scanlan who lived at this address until at least 1940.

In the decades since 1940, the house and land have changed hands several times. The dormer windows of the house are recent additions. This house provides evidence of the development of Newmarket as a farming and residential community during the 1880s.

1. Brisbane Courier, 10 December 1886

2. Lawson, Ronald Brisbane in the 1890s: A Study of an Australian Urban Society. St Lucia U of Q Press, 1973

3. Queensland Certificates of Title

4. Queensland Post Office Directories