Story courtesy Coast Lines Magazine. Written by Kelly Hudswell-Strahan

McLaren Vale, the heart of the renowned Southern Vales wine region, is steeped in rich history. But did you know about its beginnings as two distinct towns?

At the southern end was Gloucester, and the northern end Bellevue. As the townships grew, they eventually met at a halfway point, once marked by a significant gum dubbed the Halfway Tree, near the wombat crossing by the old railway line in the main street. The region was known as McLaren Vale from the time of the first European surveys, but the two townships within it had very different beginnings.

Gloucester

Gloucester was the first to evolve, near the site where the first European settlers, William Colton and Charles Hewett, established their farms Daringa and Oxenberry in 1839. After the successful farming enterprises of the Coltons and Hewetts were well publicised, others were encouraged to settle in the region.

Nicholas Browning was from a poor family in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. In their struggle to survive, he and his siblings appeared frequently in the local courts for larceny. In 1832 Nicholas was sentenced to seven years transportation to Tasmania for stealing clothing. Once a free man, he connected with a fellow convict named Hannah Sharpe, and the pair were soon wed. Hannah, a former kitchen maid who would later be known as Mary, was convicted for theft from her employer. At the end of her sentence in 1845 the couple set sail for Adelaide. Their only child, a little boy named William Nicholas, died in his infancy.

Nicholas became a publican and while conducting the Edinburgh Castle Hotel in Currie Street purchased land section 157 in the Hundred of Willunga for seventy-seven pounds. This portion of land formed part of a proposed township he named Gloucester, after his home county. Intending to start his own hotel, Nicholas’s licence application was refused on account of the proximity to William Colton’s newly constructed Devonshire Arms. As it happened, William Colton died on the opening day of his hotel, and its licence was then granted to Nicholas.

Nicholas died in 1854 and left his estate to Mary (Hannah), who remarried a carpenter named Thomas Atkinson. Thomas took on the hotel and continued to sell allotments in the subdivision of Gloucester. Mary suffered cruelly in her second short lived marriage and died as a result of excessive alcohol consumption and abuse. She was buried with Nicholas at the old Congregational Cemetery.

Gloucester became a thriving village of small business and houses.

Gloucester part town allotments. Image supplied.

Bellevue

Bellevue derived its name from Belfast born Richard Bell, who arrived in Melbourne in 1840 and travelled overland to South Australia, first settling at Wellington on the Murray. He married Mary Ellen Clift in Adelaide and in 1849 packed up his family to head to the Californian goldfields. Despite being shipwrecked at Honolulu, they made it to California, where they remained for three years before resettling at McLaren Vale.

In 1854 Richard purchased property from Charles Hewett and soon engaged the services of local surveyor Richard Budgen to undertake a survey for a township he named Bellevue. He set to work building pug houses for his workers and the Clifton Hotel, named for his wife. A small settlement was formed, and a new road made from the main street to the flour mill, originally known as Ellen Street after Mrs Bell, now known as Chalk Hill Road.

There were a small number of allotments available for purchase and Richard retained nineteen acres known as the “Mill section”. Richard also lent his name to a small hamlet in McLaren Flat named Beltunga.

In the same year Bellevue was surveyed and settled, Richard suffered a blow which began a gradual decline. Stopping at the Victoria Hotel at Tapley’s Hill, a thug named William Lewis knocked him down, kicked him and stole his money. Though recovered from the assault, his health deteriorated, and he died at the age of forty-two a year later from tuberculosis. Ellen remarried twice and outlived Richard by fifty years.

By the 1870s Bellevue was a sleepy village, the hotel had closed, and the flour mill was no longer in operation. Thomas Hardy purchased the ailing Tintara Winery, and with it the old flour mill, most of the cottages, the hotel, and the old Bellevue School. The Barn, a coach stop for teamsters making overnight stops on their way to Encounter Bay with wagon loads of wheat for the mills in Adelaide, was intended to be his horse stable but this provoked an outcry from locals. He extended the disused hotel, renaming it the Bellevue, and used the old schoolhouse and other cottages as accommodation for his employees. Hardy’s investment in the town with his resurrection of Tintara was a boost to the area and ensured its growth and survival.

McLaren Vale was officially gazetted as a town in 1923 as the two hamlets of Gloucester and Bellevue gradually merged and their early names fell out of use.

Bellevue town plan. Image supplied.