Saumarez Station

Saumarez Station, situated about five kilometres south of Armidale, was one of the earliest grazing runs established on the New England tablelands.
In 1835, Henry Dumaresq sent a large contingent of men, livestock and machinery to occupy Samaurez, a vast property of about 100,000 acres which he named in memory of his family connections with the Seigneur de Saumarez in the Channel Isles. Under the control of his superintendent, AS Wightman, a head station, store and stables were set up above Saumarez Creek. Within a few years a shearing shed and men’s huts had also been constructed.

In 1838 Dumaresq died, leaving Saumarez to his widow. In 1857, the licensed pastoral run sold to Henry Arding Thomas, who arrived with his wife, Caroline, and their first son, William, in April the following year. They added brick three-roomed cottage with surrounding verandahs to the homestead. Thomas supervised the sheep work on Samaurez and pursued a vigorous policy of land acquisition. By the 1870s, Saumarez had been consolidated as a freehold estate of over 23,000 acres. 

Thomas sold Saumarez in 1874 for £40,000 to Francis White, a second generation Australian whose family had developed a highly successful sheep farming business across New South Wales. 
No sooner had the sale gone through, however, than Francis White died suddenly at his home in Edinglassie. His eldest son, Francis John White – known to the family and subsequent generations as FJ – took charge of Samaurez in 1878. 

A new woolshed was built in 1883, and five years later, FJ, his wife Margaret (they had married in 1881), and their five children moved into a larger house further up from the creek. Over the next decade, a saddle horse stable, wagon shed, blacksmith’s shop, milking shed, fowl pens and ensilage pit were added to the property.

In 1906 he added a second storey to the Samaurez homestead which included gas lighting, interior flushing lavatories, a system of heating bath water and an improved telephone line to Armidale.

FJ died in 1934 and Margaret followed two years later. Saumarez was left to their five daughters, two of whom, Mary and Elsie, would continue to live in the house while the property itself was managed by their brother Harold Fletcher White, of Bald Blair near Guyra. As the Australian wool industry experienced increasing difficulties during the second half of the twentieth century, parts of Samaurez were sold off.

A section of the property at Chiswick was purchased by the federal government after World War Two to allow the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research to establish a pastoral research station there, while demands from the state government in the 1950s that the White family surrender large portions of the property for soldier settlement resulted in Samaurez being further reduced to about 8,000 acres by the early-1960s.

Mary, a socialite by nature who founded the Country Women’s Association in Armidale and represented the White family on the first Council of the New England University College, died in 1948, but Elsie continued to occupy the homestead at Samaurez and took an active role in the management of the property.

Elsie died in 1981 at the age of ninety-seven. The Homestead was donated to the National Trust, and was opened to the public in 1985.  

References:

Ann Philp, The Ladies of Saumarez: The Story of an Australian Country House and the Women who Called it Home During the Past Century (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1988); Bruce Mitchell and Jillian Oppenheimer, Saumarez: A History of the Property and Its People (Armidale: Saumarez Advisory Committee of the National Trust of Australia, 1995); Mitchell and Barry McDonald, Working Saumarez: People and Places on a Cattle and Sheep Station (Armidale: Saumarez Advisory Committee of the National Trust of Australia, 1996).