page_title: Glengallan Homestead
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Glengallan Homestead / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Stud merino rams, Glengallan Station near Warwick.
context_page_description: Glengallan Homestead is a heritage-listed homestead on the New England Highway, Glengallan, Southern Downs Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1864 to 1904. It is also known as Glengallan Head Station. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992 and is open to the public.
context_section_description: Glengallan Homestead, built 1867-1868, is located on the southwestern slope of Mount Marshall at the mouth of a wide valley, running west from Cunningham's Gap, near the junction of the Cunningham and New England Highways approximately 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) north of Warwick.
  This valley was the original Darling Downs, discovered and named by explorer Allan Cunningham (1791-1839) in 1827 in honour of the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Ralph Darling (1775-1858), and the name Darling Downs was later used to identify the surrounding region of open rolling country with rich and deep soils. Cunningham found a gap in the dividing range, and the following year, while visiting Moreton Bay, he found a gap which he thought was the same one he had discovered previously, and which became known as Cunningham's Gap.
  This open country had been carefully and deliberately maintained by the Aborigines in what has been called firestick farming, an annual pattern of controlled burns to protect certain resource areas and pasture for native grazing animals. The Aboriginal burning pattern was disrupted within the first years of the runs being taken up, and the local Aboriginal population were soon killed off.
  The unsettled districts outside the nineteen counties around Sydney had been thrown open to squatters by the 1836 licence system. This system proved ineffective and in 1839 a new Act was passed. This Act provided for an annual licence fee to be paid, determined per head of stock on the run, and also provided administration by Commissioners of Crown Lands. However, the squatters still had no permanency of land tenure, and in 1847 Orders in Council were introduced which allowed further 14 year leases for established unsettled runs on payment of an annual fee per head of stock. The Orders in Council also gave the run holders the pre-emptive right to purchase the land for its fair value in an unimproved state at less than one pound per acre at the completion of the lease. Pre-emption was allowed to continue until 1868, and meant that nearly all the best land, creek frontages, water holes and portions guarding leasehold areas were pre-empted. It allowed the squatters to hold onto their land, but also plunged many of them into debt often resulting in financial ruin.
  Patrick Leslie (1815-1881) born at Warthill, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the second son of William Leslie, ninth laird of Warthill and eight of Folla, had sailed from London in 1834 and arrived in New South Wales in May 1835. He gained pastoralist experience under the Macarthurs of Camden, and in 1836 went to manage the property of his uncle Davidson on the Krui River at Colleroi. By 1839 Leslie had rented Dunheved farm at Penrith, and when his brothers Walter and George arrived he decided to look for new land north of the limits of settlement. In 1840 he started with a large party for the Clarence River district, and then resolved to look at the Darling Downs. With one companion, a convict named Murphy, he followed Cunningham's trail and relocated the Darling Downs and decided on the area that was to become Toolburra and Canning Downs for his first station. Walter Leslie and Ernest Dalrymple followed with the flocks, and in 1840 the Leslies became the first settlers on the Darling Downs.
  Ernest Dalrymple took up a run next to the Leslies, and all runs on the Downs were taken up by June 1841. The Leslies originally selected all the land which became Toolburra, South Toolburra, Glengallan, Gladfield, Maryvale, Warwick and Canning Downs, and had taken up a far greater area than which they were entitled under a New South Wales licence. They had to dispose of the areas that became Glengallan, Sandy Creek, and Fred (Bracker) the German's Creek (Rosenthal) to the Aberdeen Company.
  The Leslies negotiated permission to bring supplies from the Moreton Bay settlement, even though it was not open to commerce. The settlement opened in 1842 however, and thereafter all the Downs squatters (run holders) were free to have supplies sent in and wool sent out to Ipswich, from where they could be transp
caption: Stud merino rams at Glengallan Station, 1894
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