Glengallan House

Glengallan today is a tribute not only to its visionary builder and to 19th Century craftsmen but also to the 21st Century team that brought it back to life through this delicately balanced restoration that enables the visitor to experience the best and the worst of its times.

Formal Gardens

"Roses bloom splendidly...and a very fine landscape effect is secured by great plots of multi-coloured petunias...which seem to float like fairy islands in a sea of green..." - 1904 newspaper report

A century later, roses and petunias bloom again at Glengallan. The formal garden reconstruction, guided by archaeology and early panoramic photographs, brings back to Glengallan a grace and style that endured to the end of the Gillespie era. The garden includes a parterre as laid out in the early 1870s.

Stables Site

Stables were erected on this site as early as the 1950s: The two-storey whitewashed brick stables with hay loft above survived until at least 1919. Sandstone flagging and foundations unearthed in 1995 show evidence of two earlier buildings destroyed by fire. The weatherboard buggy shed and stud stalls created a courtyard to the rear of the stables. Old brick paving has been unearthed in this area.

Station Office & Store

The sandstone Station Office and Store was erected by Donald Meiklejohn in 1864. The door of the the store aligns with the western door of the main house, suggesting the two were to be incorporated in a larger complex; evidence of cobbled paths linking the buildings. A block and tackle lifted heavy stores in and out of the stone-flagged cellar which was fitted with a wide shelf around three sides. Original shingles remain. Brown staining to lower stone courses (northern side) indicates the burden of soil eroded from hillside cultivation. More than 30cm of topsoil covers the network of cobbled paths which were necessary for the day-to-day operations in Glengallan's heavy black soil.

Site of Servants quarters

Servants' quarters, destroyed by fire in the early 1930s, comprised several rooms opening on to a verandah. In the 1880s, Glengallan employed five gardeners and seven household servants - quartered close by in order to quickly respond to hte call of bell-pulls from the main house.

Earlier homestead buildings

The first dwelling on Glengallan was a hut erected by the Campbell brothers in the early 1840s. Low-slung timber buildings, shown in 1850s Conrad Martens sketches, were home also to Marshall and Deuchar and may have been later annexed to the back of the stone house.

The Cedar Wing

From the 1880s to the 1940s, the so-called "Cedar Wing" provided bedrooms warmed by a double-side fireplace. A different structure appears on this site in earlier photographs. Both may have been Campbell or Marshall-era buildings, the latter possibly the solid cedar homestead in which Eliza Deuchar declared she was "happiest of all".

The Kitchen

Sandstone foundations mark the kitchen hearth where the enormous kitchen range was flanked by shelves housing the huge copper jam pan and other kitchen utensils; a pine dresser on the opposite wall displayed serving plates in the white and blue onion pattern of the Slade dinner service.

View to Woolshed

The legendary Jackie Howe is said to have shorn at Glengallan in the early 1880s. W.B. Slade recorded the largest number of sheep shorn in one year - 60,000 in two shearings, September and March. In one good season Glengallan sold 13,000 sheep in 12 months. Two of three wings remain of what is believed to be the oldest surviving woolshed in Queensland.

Only the bakehouse chimneys remain of the cluster of workers' cottages that hugged the slopes of Mt Marshall. The 1895 wages book records 103 employees of Glengallan which had its own school (taken over by the Education Department in 1891 and relocated in 1904), and a church, St Andrew's, now at Allora where it serves as part of St David's church hall.

The Glengallan Gates

During the years Oswald Slade was disposing of furniture and fittings from Glengallan, the sandsone pillars and iron gates were re-located to Leslie Park, Warwick, as a memorial to the pioneer Leslie brothers.

The two Bunya Pines flanking the site of the Glengallan Gates were planted after the formal gardens laid out in 1874. Two solitary pines in the Glengallan Station cultivation mark the course of the cobbled drive from the Warwick-Toowoomba road. Original buildings may have been located at the end of this avenue.