Price Morris Cottage

Price Morris was a Welshman who was in 1812 transported to New South Wales with a life sentence at around age 29. Six years after his arrival, around 1818, he married Mary, who was born in the colony and was twenty years her husband's junior. Over the first ten years of marriage, Price and Mary had five children – Sarah (b. 1819), Elizabeth (b. 1821), Price, Jr. (b. 1824), William (b. 1826), and Mary (b. 1828). By 1828 Price senior had his ticket of leave and the family was living on 12 hectares (30 a) at Lower Portland on the Hawkesbury River, cultivating 10 hectares (25 a) and running half a dozen cattle.^[1]

Shortly after the surveyor Felton Mathew compiled his map of all the occupied farms in the Macdonald Valley in 1833-34 (on which the Morrises do not feature), Price and Mary moved to St Albans, and on this land, just to the south of the swampy land in the middle of the rectangular block, they built the slab section of the present cottage. The cottage was deliberately on an elevated site to minimise the danger of flooding and overlooked their cultivation paddock. The exact date of building is not known, but it is likely to be between 1835 and 1837. Certainly the house was in existence by 1838 when what is claimed to have been the first Methodist service in the area was held in the cottage.^[1]

Methodism was a strong bond between the Morrises and the Walker family who had moved from the Hawkesbury to the Macdonald around 1830 and established three generations of Methodist preachers. The Walters of the Industrious Settler, some of the Baileys, and the large Thompson fan-lily were also Methodists living nearby. This Methodist group was a counter-balance to the powerful Catholic influence of Sheehy and Watson, who gave land for the Catholic churches of St Joseph's and Our Lady of Loreto in 1839. Catholicism was also strong in the new township of St Albans.^[1]

The survey in 1837 and gazettal in 1841 of a government township just across the Macdonald River from Price Morris's cottage confirmed the strategic nature of his purchase. In the 1830s there was a long-established cattle drovers' camp and a "bullock wharf" nearby on the river, at the head of navigation. The creation of the small grid pattern township of St Albans in the 1840s brought more population, much of it Catholic and Anglican, purchasing town allotments in 1842 and thereafter. The Anglican church was opened in 1843, in the township, the Settlers Arms in 1848. A Methodist church was finally built in 1853.^[1]

By 1844 Price and Mary Morris had eleven children, establishing a network of interrelationships with other valley families, but both then returned to England and never returned to Australia. Price died in 1867 and Mary in 1888. Price, Jr. is presumably the Price Morris who was buried in St Albans cemetery in the year of his father's death, 1867.^[1]

Margaret, one of the daughters-in-law of Price senior, was "Mag the Midwife" (b. 1839) whose business brought many visitors to the Morris cottage until her death in 1907.^[1]

The third generation included William Price Morris (1874–1957), a grandson of Price and Mary; his memories of nineteenth-century St Albans were extensively used by Mrs Hutton Neve in her history of the valley.^[1]

After William Price Morris died in 1957, the land remained in Morris hands but the original cottage was occupied by Beatrice Rose, a member of a very early Hawkesbury and Webbs Creek family. In Rose's time a fibro addition was made to the house, to serve as a dining-room, while she used both the huge indoor fireplace in winter and an outdoor fireplace in summer. Rose died in the 1970s and the cottage remained unoccupied. Linton Morris and his wife, the owners of portion 26, occupied a modern house on the north end of the land. After Mr Morris' death, his widow continued to own and occupy the land, assisted by her children. The property is now owned by her daughter, Mrs Joyce Stepto and her husband Doug.^[2][1]

The cottage has subsequently been restored and now operates as a bed and breakfast.^[1]