Crendon

Statement of Significance

Crendon is one of the earliest farmhouses in the district and has associations with the Fry family who have owned the place for 90 years. The farmhouse is set on rising ground in the Capel River Valley and is a substantial and well executed example of a Victorian Georgian farmhouse.

Physical Description

Crendon is a single storey brick house with a moderately pitched hipped roof in the Victorian Georgian style, surrounded by a deep bullnosed verandah. The homestead is situated five miles south of Donnybrook on a slight hill on Upper Capel Road. It overlooks the flats where the Upper Capel River winds round. The river and flats were normally dry. Now the flats are green as they are watered from a dam built in late 1950s.

History

Crendon was first taken up by David Eedle (b. Long Crendon, England, 1814, arr. 1842), who worked at Ravenswood to gain local farming knowledge, before acquiring land at Brunswick (‘Frogmore’) and at Donnybrook, naming the latter property after his birthplace. In the late 1880s, Henry N. Watts leased Crendon, occupying a dwelling of which little is known. In early 1889, J. Levi Bentley, of Gingin, purchased it for £1,300, and returned to Gingin. On 3 July, Bentley came back to Crendon (where Watts refused him a room), and on 9 July, began building ‘a hut etc.’ (Bentley’s diary, quoted in Frost, A. C., op. cit., p. 11) on which he worked for some weeks. On 30 August, he went to Gingin for cattle, and on 27 September, he arrived with them at the farm he renamed ‘Crendon Downs’. On 15 January 1890, he moved into his recently completed house, and after his marriage to Emily Scrivener in April, it became their family home. Bentley operated Crendon as a mixed farm, with cattle, sheep and pigs, and growing potatoes, grain and chaff. Active in the local community, he was inaugural chairman of Preston Roads Board (1896). In 1904, John Gurney Fry and Henry Philip Fry (arr. 1894, Henry Philip, d. Gallipoli, 1915) purchased Crendon Downs. It reverted to the original name of Crendon, and remains in the Fry family in the early 2000s. John married Mary Clifton, and they raised their family at Crendon. She ran the farm for some years as M. C. Fry & Sons, before Philip, George and Michael Fry, took over the expanded area. In the late twentieth century, it operated as three separate farms under John S. Fry, Graeme Fry, and Mike Fry (who lived in the old homestead, which reverted to the name ‘Crendon Downs’.

Integrity/Authenticity

High

Condition

Good

Uses

Historic Themes

Creation Date

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