Bolwarra House is located on the original 2030-acre Bolwarra land grant, now the Maitland suburb of the same name.
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The grantee was John Brown who arrived in New South Wales on the 'Minerva' in 1821.
He was assigned 20 convicts to work the property.
Brown soon suffered financial difficulties and a notice in the Sydney Gazette in 1825 stated that 2200 acres (of which 60 were cleared and 12 under maize) were to be sold.
Thomas McQueen of Segenhoe made the purchase but it appears that Brown remained there; he is named in a report in the Australian in 1827 after a lightning strike destroyed a barn and 1200 bushels of wheat.
The Sydney Gazette in 1832 tells how Brown drank himself to death in Sydney.
McQueen offered Bolwarra for sale in 1833 with "several miles of riverfront that can float a large barge, while steamers ply to Morpeth only a few miles distant".
Reference was made to its "splendid scenery, 300 acres of fertile cleared land, lagoons, swamps, and a new home".
The new owner was Richard Jones, a successful but controversial businessman and politician and the focus of a recent book by David Marr titled 'Killing for Country'.
Marr describes how Jones became one of the colony's richest figures, "a silky man with a plain name", "a great white carp in the colonial pond, half hidden in the weeds, always feeding and always dangerous".
He built an empire based on trade, shipping, wool, tea, opium, whaling and Saxon sheep (which he introduced)
- Bob Cameron
Jones had properties at Patrick's Plains (Singleton) and Pokolbin before purchasing Bolwarra for £3,157. He built an empire based on trade, shipping, wool, tea, opium, whaling and Saxon sheep (which he introduced). He founded the Sydney Gazette, Kings School and the Australian Gas Light company and was President of the Bank of NSW and a founding Member of the Legislative Council. He lived in Darlinghurst but built a modest Georgian home at Bolwarra with a two-storey outbuilding housing 31 convicts, a scullery, butchery and dairy. There was also an imposing barn.
Governor Gibbs visited, commenting that "Bolwarra was a well cultivated farm with a good breed of cattle".
Jones' business interests soured during the 1840s depression and he filed for bankruptcy in 1843.
Bolwarra passed to the Australian Trustee Company which ran the property as 60 small (14-36 acres) tenanted working farms. Their boundaries can still be observed.
In 1848 Bolwarra was sold for £5800 to James and David Dixon. David lived there with his wife and eight children. He had a magnificent Victorian villa built, attached to the old house.
It comprised three storeys with fine gardens, a summer house, a croquet lawn, two tennis courts, a vineyard, an orchard and a boatshed. JW Pender, later a leading architect, was the job's foreman.
Tragically Dixon died in 1867, squashed between a dray and the barn. His widow sold half of the land in 1876.
The house was sold again in 1885, to John and Jane Rourke who had a large saddlery. They converted the barn to stables and added further outbuildings. Subdivisions and sales proceeded in several tranches thereafter.
The Corner family purchased Bolwarra in 1918 and engaged WH Pender, son of the original architect, to demolish the original attached cottage, extend to the side and rear and remove the top two floors. The story of the "house that lost its head" was thus created.
