Saumarez Homestead is a heritage-listed homestead located at 230 Saumarez Road, Armidale in the Armidale Regional Council local government area of New South Wales, Australia. The homestead was designed by J. W. Pender in the Federation Edwardian style and built between 1888 and 1906 by H. E. Elliott, while the garden was established by Mary White. The property is currently owned by the National Trust of Australia (NSW), who operate it as a museum and function venue. The homestead was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 1 March 2002.
The remaining Saumarez property consists of of land and includes a fully furnished 30-room house, which includes all its original furnishings. There are 15 other buildings dating from 1880 up until 1910, including a cottage, a milking shed, stables, horse yards, a blacksmith's shop and a slaughterhouse, along with collections of farming equipment and other items. The property contains approximately 6,500 household collection items, and a further 3,500 pieces of farming equipment and collection items. It can be rented for weddings and other functions, and has also been used for larger events such as a film festival and fashion shows.
History Saumarez was formerly the nucleus of a major New England pastoral property. The on which the homestead and station buildings stand were subdivided off the continuing Saumarez property of approximately , which are run by pastoralists, the White family.
The naming of Saumarez Saumarez, a place name and family name, comes from the Channel Islands, Crown Dependencies of the United Kingdom since the Napoleonic Wars. It was the name chosen by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dumaresq, whose men and stock first occupied this part of the New England tableland in 1834–35. Both Saumarez and St Ives Heliers, Dumaresq's land grant "St. Heliers", near Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley, commemorated places and events of significance to the Dumaresq family.
Henry's grandfather, John Dumaresq, was honoured by Britain for his defence in 1781 of St Helier, the capital of Jersey. An earlier John Dumaresq was Seigneur of Saumarez, and this name occurs as a forename in the Dumaresq family. There were also marriages between the Dumaresq and a Guernsey Island family, de Sausmarez, who still live in Sausmarez manor which is open to visitors in Summer. The various spellings of Saumarez have evolved through the centuries but all refer to the Channel Island families and places.
The Dumaresq family: 1834–1856 Colonel Henry Dumaresq came to NSW in 1825 as a private secretary to his brother-in-law Governor Darling and in 1833 was appointed Commissioner in charge of the Australian Agricultural Company based at Port Stephens and Stroud. With his brother Captain William Dumaresq, he was responsible for the earliest European settlement of land on the tablelands near the later established town of Armidale when his men with stock and stores were sent beyond the boundaries of official settlement to a region where Aboriginal people had occupied the land for at least 8,000 years.
Henry Dumaresq's head station was established at Saumarez, a squatting run of about for which he held a A£10 licence from 1837. The run extended from Uralla in the south to north of Mount Duval and covered the area of the Rocky River goldfields.
In 1848 the run carried about 16,000 sheep, 1600 cattle and was run by a staff of about 24 men. The Dumaresq family had built slab houses and huts, a store, yards, woolsheds, washpool and cultivated small paddocks for wheat and oats.
Census data show that the Dumaresq manager on Saumarez in the 1840s had a wife living there, but nothing is known of her name nor origin. The store, at the site of the first homestead, serviced the needs of the resident manager, his shepherds and the surrounding settlers until the township of Armidale was established in 1839.
Gold was discovered at Rocky River on Saumarez in the early 1850s and from that time gold diggers in large numbers flocked to the digging part of the sheep station. After Henry's death in 1838 aged 46, Saumarez was inherited by his widow, Elizabeth Sophia Dumaresq, who held it until 1856 when she sold it to Henry Arding Thomas. Sophia returned to England.
A new book by Ann Philp documents the Thomas and Downes families, whose descendants the Thomases arrived in Sydney in 1852, followed by a sixteen-year residence at Saumarez.
Saumarez was advertised for public auction (in 1857) as: "that splendid property, situate in the District of New England, and well known as the Saumarez Run; is distant only a couple of miles from the Town of Armidale ... the country is rich for pastoral purposes, and there are large tracts of the best agricultural land, the Whole Abundantly Watered ... The Grazing Capabilities may be estimated at 35,000 sheep and 3000 head of cattle ...the Wool has always received the Highest Market Prices. The Improvements on the Head Station are a six-room cottage, kitchen and store detached, 6 stall stable, Barn, Large Woolshed, Garden, well stocked with fruit trees, five men's huts recently built".
Henry Arding Thomas: 1856–1874 H.A. Thomas was born in India in 1819, where his father served in the British Army. After pastoral experience at Braidwood and in Queensland, Thomas bought Saumarez from Sophia Dumaresq in 1856. Thomas had married Caroline Husband in 1856 and they came to live in New England at Saumarez where their family of six children were born.
Thomas, his new wife and infant son took possession of the existing buildings on the land near Saumarez Creek, these included the store, a barn, a wool shed and a six-roomed slab cottage. In this initial Saumarez homestead Caroline was to bear seven more infants, although not all of her first eight children survived. Life was hard, although...compared with the living conditions of the small settlers nearby at Saumarez Ponds or those of the wives of Saumarez employees, Caroline's six-roomed house with detached kitchen and laundry, staffed by a male cook and female household help, was almost palatial.
Thomas began his freehold consolidation of Saumarez by applying in 1858 for a homestead block of and two smaller blocks. The large block, upon which Saumarez Homestead now stands was difficult to acquire from the Crown. After application had been made and the block had been duly measured the Government decided to reserve a site for the village of Saumarez at a point where the new Great Northern Road crossed Saumarez Creek. Re-measuring and other difficulties meant that the final sale of reduced block of was not concluded until 1865. Thomas in 1865 made further pre-emptive purchases totalling some under the provisions of the Robertson Land Acts and also sought to use the free selection provisions of this act to secure land near the homestead block.
In 1864 all members of his family and some of his employees selected land on Saumarez. Because they could not fulfil the residence requirements these dummy selectors forfeited their deposits and their selections. This however was Thomas' intention as he expected the forfeited land to come to sale at public auction. The Minister for Lands tried to prevent this but Thomas, not to be beaten, had the matter raised in parliament and ultimately the attorney general ruled in his favour. Thomas thus used the letter of the law to acquire an additional of Saumarez.
Between 1862 and 1868 Thomas was able to purchase at ordinary auction sales more than of Saumarez, paying an average slightly over one pound per acre. By 1870 he had consolidated over and Saumarez was a substantial freehold property. By this time most of the Saumarez run had disappeared: about half had been reserved by the Crown-principally for the Armidale and Uralla Reserves and the Rocky River Goldfield Reserve. Thomas himself had subdivided the old run, forming and selling the new runs of Eversleigh in 1863 and Lindsay in 1865. In its first stage the Saumarez Homestead was sited close to the store, stables and barn, at the working heart of the property. It was typical of the living conditions enjoyed by other hard working and financially established rural property owners.
In due time, largely to house the additional children, Thomas built the three-roomed brick house with surrounding verandahs, which is still standing, adding it to the earlier six-roomed timber slab cottage built by the Dumaresq family. This section has been demolished, although its door, windows, and mantelpiece were probably used in the timber cottage still standing nearby. The whole complex was softened by a developing garden with English trees, reminding Caroline of "home". The Thomas' developed Saumarez's garden. Thomas was a local magistrate, foundation president of the pastoral and Agricultural Society (initiating the first agricultural show on the Northern Tablelands), committee member of the Armidale hospital and involved with Anglican Church affairs. He was sympathetic to the selectors, encouraging closer settlement on land that had previously been occupied by the Saumarez sheep, as former gold diggers turned to farming on its fertile basalt soils.
In 1874 Thomas sold Saumarez to Frank White of "Edinglassie", Muswellbrook and moved closer to Sydney to Wivenhoe near Cobbitty to enjoy a quieter, easier lifestyle as a gentleman farmer. He lived there until his death in 1884 and his wife stayed on until she died in 1903.
The White family: 1874–1984 When Frank White, second son of James White of Edinglassie, Muswellbrook, purchased Saumarez from H. A. Thomas he was establishing his family on a property which they have held ever since. Frank died in the following year aged 45 years so that his eldest son, Francis John ('FJ') White was born in 1854 into the second generation of a successful sheep farming family. His father James had been employed 50 years earlier to bring a ship load of sheep to the colony and since that time Frank and his brothers had acquired a prosperous chain of properties extending out from the Hunter Valley. However Frank White died suddenly only months after purchasing Saumarez station and it was his eldest son Francis John (F.J.) White, still a young bachelor, who settled at Saumarez and was left with the responsibility of developing it, at that time a property of less than .
Throughout his life F. J. White built up a valuable rural land holding which included Aberfoil and Bald Blair east of Guyra as well as Saumarez and shares in Queensland and Northern Territory properties. He had close family and business links with his brothers based in the Hunter Valley at Edinglassie, Belltrees, Timor, Segenhoe and Martindale, his uncle F. R. White at Harben Vale, Blandford, Rockwood east of Uralla and at Booloominbah near Armidale.
In 1881 F. J. White married Margaret (Maggie) Fletcher of Orundunby, Walcha and they lived in the Thomas-built (slab hut with brick additions) house where five of their children were born. By 1886 the success of Saumarez wool had enabled F. J. White to pay off the mortgage he had inherited on the Saumarez property and the steady growth of his family prompted him to thoughts of building a larger house. He contracted the Maitland architect, J. W. Pender, to design a house suitable for his family for not more than two thousand five hundred pounds. He chose a site slightly removed from and overlooking the previous stables-stores area.
The new Saumarez homestead was single storey, built of bricks baked on site and completed by May 1888. The Whites chose the date for the family's move into the new homestead as 11 May 1888—their seventh wedding anniversary. It was built by H. E. Elliott of Armidale. It was typical of a nineteenth century large landholders home; but its multiple bedrooms and nurseries and servant accommodation and the smallness of its public rooms stressed its purpose of family comfort rather than an entertainment centre.