page_title: Wright Family Houses
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Wright Family Houses / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial photograph from the Eclipse Colliery Disaster, Ipswich, 1893 In the Ipswich floods of 1893, water entered the Eclipse Colliery at Tivoli and seven miners were drowned, including Thomas and George Wright, sons of the owner. After the floods subsided, volunteers had to search the mine to recover the bodies as there was no trained rescue service. This memorial photograph shows a group portrait of the rescuers and another collage of portraits of the miners who died. There is a memorial plaque included, which gives the name of the miners and the date they died.
context_page_description: The Wright Family Houses area heritage-listed group of detached houses at 98/100/106 Mt Crosby Road, Tivoli, City of Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. It was built from c. 1898 onwards. No. 100 is also known as Oaklands and No. 106 is also known as Wrightlands. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 30 January 2004.
context_section_description: The Wright family houses precinct at 98, 100 and 106 Mt Crosby Road, Tivoli, are 3 timber houses on adjoining allotments built c. 1898-1903 for John and Elizabeth Wright.
  The allotments on which these residences are situated were originally a part of the land purchased in 1864 as Portion 66, parish of Chuwar, County of Stanley (43 acres), by Josiah Bowring Sloman, part proprietor of the Queensland Times. The land appears to have remained unimproved during the 30 years of Sloman's ownership and by the mid-1890s it had been subdivided.
  In September 1894, the title to the subdivisions on which the houses at 98 and 106 Mt Crosby Road now stand was transferred to Elizabeth Ann Wright, the wife of John Wright. Five years later Elizabeth was registered as the owner of the allotment where the main family house, known as Oaklands, was constructed and which is now delineated as 100 Mt Crosby Road. John Wright was born in 1837 at Coolbawm, County Kilkenny, Ireland, and married Elizabeth in 1862. He and his wife arrived in Moreton Bay on board the Naval Reserve in 1867 and in October of that year he moved to Ipswich to find work, while his wife and children remained in Brisbane. In the 1860s, Ipswich was an emerging centre of commercial and industrial activity and, despite the financial crisis of this period, it remained a place of opportunity for early pioneers. Coal mining was a burgeoning industry in the district at this time and Wright was from a long line of colliery owners in Ireland and had worked for several years in his father's mine before embarking for Australia This experience secured him a job at the Old Tivoli Pit owned by Harry Hooper and John Robinson, where he remained until 1873. In that year he negotiated a lease with Josiah Sloman, who then owned Portions 65 and 66, for mining rights on the land and with the financial backing of John Blond, a Brisbane coal dealer, he opened a small mine known as Perseverance Mine. Wright's mining interests continued to expand over the years with the opening of the Eclipse mine in Tivoli as well as mines in other coal-bearing districts like Purga, Walloon, Burrum and Oakey. While the Eclipse mine was lost in the 1893 floods, along with 2 of John's sons, the family business remained strong and his youngest sons, Andrew and John, later became mine managers. The Wrights became the largest producer of coke in Queensland and in 1910 the Jubilee History of Ipswich reported that the Wrights held contracts with the Mt Crosby Pumping Station, the Ipswich Pumping Station, Queensland Woollen Company, Electric Light Company of Toowoomba and Queensland Railway.
  Although John Wright's mining interests were spread over Queensland, he resided in Tivoli until his death in 1915 and acquired a distinct local patriotism. While described in The History of Queensland (1919) as a "man of quiet disposition, reserved, and unassuming", he was known to have supported many local charities and with his wife helped found a Sunday school in the area. The Wrights also became prominent freehold landowners in the North Ipswich district, with Brassall Shire Council Valuation Registers showing the family owned several estates by the early 1900s. Despite their numerous real estate interests, the Wrights favoured the allotments on Mt Crosby Road (formerly known as Tivoli Road and Junction Road) for their family homes. No documentary evidence exists to definitively date the main family residence at 100 Mt Crosby Road, however it is known to have been existence by January 1898 when it was described in The Queenslander as "one of the nattiest villas in North Ipswich". The adjoining properties at 98 and 106 Mt Crosby Road reputedly were built for Andrew Wright and John Wright junior probably by 1903, the year of the earliest extant Brassall Shire Council Valuation Register, which records that on the land now covered by 98, 100 and 106 Mt Crosby Road there existed 3 residences owned by Elizabeth Ann Wright.
  The juxtaposition of these properties is as much a physical representation of the rising social and financial fortune
caption: Memorial photograph from the Eclipse Colliery Disaster, Ipswich, 1893
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