Rediscovering the first house in Evandale (the original 1820 Prosperous House still hidden behind the 1836 Mansion house version now known as ‘Fallgrove’) [a post to the Launceston Pictures fb group]
In our recent research into ‘the lost history of early Evandale’ (linked to the ‘forgotten story’ and legacy of the town’s founder Kennedy Murray) we unexpectedly found the original c1820 Prosperous House built by Murray in 1820 on his first farmland grant approved by Governor Macquarie. In his 1967 History of Evandale, Karl Von Stieglitz referred to how “John Glover died in the small cottage behind the [main Prosperous] house” – perhaps not understanding or appreciating how this cottage was not just the original Prosperous House, but the first house or cottage in the emerging Evandale.
The adjacent Prosperous farmland became the main area of the emerging Evandale in the 1830s as also an emancipist village that was still one of the biggest towns in Van Diemens’ Land in the 1842 census – and in 1837 with the also largely forgotten Evandale-Launceston Water Scheme (one of the great projects of Colonial Australia) perhaps briefly ‘larger’ than nearby Launceston at the time. This lost history and related forgotten stories are recovered in our research written up in a book just out titled Prosperous: the Kennedy Murrays and the origins of historic Evandale in early Colonial Australia (see cameronkrichards.net/kennedymurrays).
The Evandale History Society provided us with a copy of the mansion version of Prosperous House from a Readers Digest special on historic towns of Australia (with the date missing – if anyone can help provide this information?). Next to this is the nicely renovated version still at 1 Logan Road with the original 1820 cottage still hiding behind it but with a few of its hidden secrets now revealed).
