page_title: Geeumbi
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Geeumbi / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Studio portrait of Dr. Thomas A. Price
context_page_description: Geeumbi is a heritage-listed villa at 1 South Street, Rangeville, Toowoomba, Toowoomba Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Thomas Arthur Price for his own residence and built from 1914 to 1918 by Ernest Pottinger. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
context_section_description: Geeumbi (the Aboriginal name for Table Top Mountain, which the house overlooks) was built between the years 1914–1918 by Ernest Pottinger for Dr Thomas Arthur Price and his wife. The house is a substantial concrete structure of unusual design set in extensive mature gardens on the southern Toowoomba Range commanding wide-ranging easterly views. It is situated amongst other substantial properties including Rodway across South Street constructed in 1904. The owner, Dr Price, designed Geeumbi himself having been an architecture student for two years in Brisbane before leaving Australia to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
  Dr Thomas Price arrived in Toowoomba in 1903 to take up a position at the Willowburn Mental Hospital. He later went into private medical practice but following World War I started a practice as an Ear, Nose and Throat Specialist at both the Toowoomba General Hospital and St Vincent's Hospital. From the time of his arrival in Toowoomba Dr. Price had been concerned for the health of the community as mosquitoes were a major problem due to the swamps and open drains that ran throughout the town. Despite campaigning for the appointment of a Government Inspector to control the mosquito problem he was not successful until he stood and was elected to the Toowoomba City Council in 1912. After he was elected Mayor in 1918, Dr. Price stepped-up his campaign and was eventually successful in draining the swamps and eradicating the mosquito problem in Toowoomba. He was similarly interested in the welfare of the youth of the city. He was a Scout Leader and with the assistance of his wife started the Boy Scouts and Girl Guide movements in the city using his own property for camps and orientation exercises. In the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression, Dr. Price organized a self-help camp at Redwood Park for the itinerant unemployed. Much of the fresh vegetables to feed the men in this camp came from the kitchen garden around Geeumbi. Shortly before his death in 1957 Dr Price sold Geeumbi and retired to live in Sydney. His wife Hester had died at Toowoomba in 1944. The Dr Price Memorial Mothercraft Centre perpetuates his memory in Toowoomba.
  The land on which Geeumbi sits has been transferred and subdivided a number of times since the original deed of grant was proclaimed on 25/9/1889. William Tirril was the first owner of the land which comprised 200 acres (81 ha) of steep, heavily timbered land on the escarpment of the range. Tirril cleared much of the land and established a dairy farm on the site. The farm had originally extended from the present Rowbottom Street in the west to the boundary of Hartmann's land to the north and had South Street as its southern boundary. (Hartmann's land eventually became the Picnic Point parklands.) At this stage much of the land on the Southern Range was sparsely populated and devoted to farming and timber getting.
  The land passed through several hands until Dr Price purchased a sub-division of the original farm in 1912 on which the old timber farmhouse and several out-buildings were situated. Before and during the construction of their new home, the Price family lived in the original farmhouse just a short distance away from the building site. Evidence of this first house can be found in the concrete pathway leading from an opening in the hedge on the South Street frontage and in a low wall, once a portion of the foundations. This wall has been incorporated in the garden terracing to the southwest of the front entrance of Geeumbi.
  At the beginning of the twentieth century many of the houses built on the escarpment of the Range in Toowoomba were substantial and affluent places intended as summer residences, e.g. Harlaxton House and Rodway. A trend had developed by the end of the 19th century for wealthy squatters and prominent Brisbane businessmen and politicians to take advantage of the natural views and environment of the Toowoomba Range as well as the "invigorating" climate. The construction of Geeumbi from 1914-1918 followed this pattern of affluent settlement in t
caption: Dr Price, as an older man
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