Butcher’s Shop

This shop has always been a butchery and is believed to have been built in 1922 for the Estate of HS Williams, which developed several businesses on land close to the railway station at Yungaburra in the 1920s.

The first Europeans on the Atherton Tablelands were engaged in timbergetting and mining, but the rich soil and cool climate were thought particularly suitable for the development of agriculture. In 1885 a Village Settlement scheme was introduced which offered settlers 40 acre farm blocks with home sites clustered as a village. In 1888 a village settlement was laid out at Allumbah Pocket, later to become Yungaburra. At the same time a railway from the port of Cairns to the Tableland was begun, although it took far longer to reach its objective than originally envisaged. The first farms at Allumbah were taken up in 1891, though the scheme proved unsuccessful. The railway reached Mareeba in 1895 and Atherton in 1903, greatly improving access to the area. Following new Land Acts in the early 1900s to encourage closer settlement which had more practical requirements, more people took up land around Allumbah. The land on which the butcher shop was later built, and which was to become the commercial heart of Yungaburra, was part of an Agricultural Farms selected by George O’Donnell in 1899.

In 1900 the land was sold to George Wedderburn and subdivided into numerous small blocks in 1910. Six acres were acquired by the Railway Commissioner and the position of the new railway station caused a geographic shift in focus from the original settlement which was located towards the north west of the new commercial centre. Buildings were constructed or relocated near the railway. Two of the blocks positioned close to the station were purchased in 1911 by AS and FC Williams for a new hotel. The Williams family’s interest in this area grew as they acquired land adjoining the hotel over the next few years.

H.S. Williams had arrived in Australia in the 1860s and worked in a number of occupations before taking up land at Scrubby Creek on the Tablelands. After losing his dairy cattle to tick in 1895, Williams turned to business and ran a store and butchery at Scrubby Creek and the Carriers Arms hotel at Carrington, He then acquired land in the original Allumbah settlement in 1898 and established a store.