Crown Land Sales Register, Smithfield, May 1877

Crown Land Sales Register, Smithfield, May 1877

Two-page extract of the Land Sales Register, a large hard-backed register book showing sales of Crown Lands in the Colony of Queensland. This particular register is Volume 4 which contained the 1877 sales for towns beginning with the letters C-H (Cairns to Helidon). The Smithfield land sales were held in Cairns, so were recorded in the Cairns register.

Volume 4, folio 172 details land purchased in Smithfield on 29 May 1877, when 43 allotments in the Smithfield town Sections 1, 3 and 4 were auctioned. The register shows: the value of improvements on the allotments at the time of auction; the Lot number; the class of land; the allotment number; the Section number; the area of the lot; the upset price per acre (£50); the amount per lot; the total amount for the land; the deposit paid; the name of the bidder; and the signature of the purchaser and their residence.

James Powers [Land Agent for the Cairns Land Agent's District]

Crown Land Sales Register;
Crown lands--Australia--Queensland--History--Sources--Catalogs;
Land sales contracts;
Land tenure--Australia--Queensland--History--19th century;
Queensland State Archive;
Queensland--History.

29 May 1877

James Powers, Land Agent for the Cairns Land Agent's District, Crown Lands Office, Cairns.

The second round of land sales in the Cairns region were held at the Cairns Police Office at 11.00 am on 29 May 1877.1 The Cairns Crown Land office had opened on 1 March 1877, and Police Magistrate Howard St. George had been appointed Land Commissioner and the Clerk of Petty Sessions at Cairns, James Powers, was Land Agent for the Cairns Land Agent's District. Forty-three allotments were advertised for sale at Smithfield, but only 17 received any interest.2 The sale of land at Smithfield realised £205/-.

Seven of the Smithfield allotments had improvements - three of them were hotels; Robert Jackson Craig & Co.’s North Star Hotel was valued at £335, Richard Uhr’s Royal Hotel at £414, and Henry Koch’s American Hotel at £530. When the auction started there was little competition among buyers, with 14 of the lots going uncontested and selling for the upset price of £11/5/-. Twenty-six allotments were ‘not offered for’ and did not receive a single bid, even though these allotments were already occupied by the tenants and businesses who had petitioned the Secretary for Public Lands four months earlier – businesses such as Sali Mendelsohn's drapery, John Faler's Last Resource Hotel, T. Moran's hotel, James Arbouin's store, S. Starkey's store, Thomas Henry Williams's store, Charles Bancly's bakery, William Greer's cordial manufacturers, Joesph Kaufmann's restaurant, and George Shepherd's saddlery. Only two allotments troubled the auctioneer, with allotment ten in section four, which was by the river and next to Craig’s wharf, receiving most interest. Michael McCormack purchased this block for £25 after some spirited bidding.

Old Bill Smith, the pioneer and Smithfield publican, did not purchase any land at Smithfield. His wife, Mary, purchased an unimproved block, Allotment 19 in Section 3, at this auction, with Bill Smith placing the bid as her agent. It has been suggested that Smith was an undisclosed bankrupt and was therefore unable to purchase land, and so resorted to purchasing land in his wife’s name.3 WHether or not Smith was bankrupt is not known, but he was certainly in financial difficulties, and after paying a £3 deposit on the allotment on the day of the sale, he failed to pay the balance within four weeks and so Mary Smith forfeited the land and the deposit.

'Crown Land Sales', The Queenslander, Saturday 5 May 1877: 5.

• ^1. The Queenslander, 5 May 1877: 5. ↩

• ^2. Crown Land Sales Register, ID 1543, Queensland State Archives. ↩

• ^3. Dorothy Jones, Trinity Phoenix: a history of Cairns, (Cairns: Cairns Post, 1976): 103. ↩

Item originally controlled by the colonial Queensland Government's Lands Department. Control passed to the Queenslanded Department of Natural Resources, Mines and Energy (II).

Two page extract of large hard-back register book

Folio Book

165138S1454201E
Old Smithfield township, Barron QLD 4871
Colonial Queensland
1870s

This page © 2021 oldsmithfield.com
Original item © Queensland State Archives.

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