Sidney Seymour Cottage

Our Cottage at 20 Palmer Street Romsey was named Sidney Seymour Cottage because it was the home of Sidney and Elizabeth Seymour and their family for sixty years. Sidney and Elizabeth, both born in Somerset, England, married in May 1840 and in June they sailed for Australia. They were part of the British government’s early bounty scheme. The Seymour family settled in Romsey around 1855 and farmed the land as tenants. In 1885 Seymour eventually purchased the property from local landowner, John Pinney Bear. Seymour died in November 1913; his wife, Elizabeth had predeceased him in 1901. The family owned the Cottage until 1915.

This Cottage is of great social and cultural significance to Romsey. It is one of the first three residences built in Romsey and was constructed in 1855 from pairs of meranti timber doors imported from Singapore in the early 1850s. It remains unclear how Seymour acquired the pairs of doors. The trade in Singaporean pre-fabricated buildings, or in this case the meranti door components, is a largely unknown aspect of Australia’s nineteenth century mercantile history, and this Cottage is a fine example set in regional Victoria. The Cottage originally consisted of three bedrooms, sitting room and kitchen.

The property changed hands many times between 1915 and the 1940s. Mrs Isa Allen owned the Cottage for nearly forty years. In 1982 she gifted it to the people of Romsey ‘for the purpose of preservation of the historical homestead’. It was later taken over by the Historical Society. Sidney Seymour Cottage was Heritage listed in 2011. In August 2021 the Society was the recipient of a Heritage Victoria Living Heritage Grant and in June 2022 the Conservation Management Plan, Garden Conservation Plan and Structural Report were completed. It is estimated the Society needs to raise more than $300,000 to restore the building.

Enquiries: John Spring - 0409 861 876