Henry Yelverton (merchant)

Henry Yelverton (1821 – 1 April 1880) was an Australian sawmiller and timber merchant.

Yelverton was born in London, England; his father, Edward, was a jeweller. He went to the United States aged 18, having originally planned to study medicine, and was employed by a whaling ship that took him to Western Australia in 1845. He worked near Perth, employing sawyers by 1849. In 1853 he was a cooper and had bought a brig with a business partner to transport timber to the eastern colonies. He moved to the Vasse River area near Busselton in 1855. In 1858 he built a steam sawmill at Quindalup that provided timber from jarrah and tuart forests to the eastern colonies, British India, and Ceylon and employed up to 120 ex-convicts.[1] He built a jetty, roads, bridges and a horse tramway for his forestry business, as well as Busselton's first courthouse.[1][2] His company began the construction of Busselton Jetty in 1864 and 1865.[3] He was also involved in the Castle Bay Whaling Company, was licensee of the Race Horse Inn at Fremantle, and smuggled tobacco for extra income.[1][4] Customs officials heavily fined him for his tobacco-smuggling activities, but this did not affect his local standing; local consensus was that "he had done much more for the district than the government ever had".[1] In 1865, he had exported almost £11,000 of timber out of the £15,693 worth of the material exported in the entire colony of Western Australia.[1] His financial situation was unstable, however; he was bankrupt in September 1862 and May 1866, and was apparently struggling financially in 1868 and 1872–73. In January 1880 he was seriously injured in a logging accident; he died on 1 April of that year, aged 58.[1]

He married Mary Marshall, the daughter of a clerk, on 7 June 1853 at St George's Anglican Church; the couple had two sons and nine daughters. His son Henry John, who later became a state politician, took over his father's timber business after his death. It was eventually bought out by the Imperial Jarrah Wood Corporation, which was subsequently merged into Millars.[1]

The locality of Yelverton is named after him.[5]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Robertson, J. R. (1976). "Yelverton, Henry (1821–1880)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 6, MUP. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. ISBN 978-0-522-84459-7. ISSN 1833-7538. OCLC 70677943. Retrieved 13 July 2019.
  2. ^ Municipal Heritage Inventory (PDF). City of Busselton. 2013. p. 135. Retrieved 20 October 2022.
  3. ^ "Register of Heritage Places – Assessment Documentation" (pdf). Heritage Council of Western Australia. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  4. ^ "Whaling at Castle Bay". Meelup Park. Retrieved 13 July 2019.
  5. ^ "Yelverton Mill Precinct". State Heritage Office. Retrieved 14 July 2019.
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