The locality of Aylmerton on Mittagong’s outskirts extends north of Braemar as far as Alpine and includes the area between the Old Hume Highway and Old South Road.
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The earliest references to Aylmerton being a local place name appear in the Sydney Morning Herald. In October 1881, WG Massingham advertised his Homebush residence for lease, giving his address as Aylmerton, Mittagong. The following year in May his wife is listed as giving birth to a daughter at their new Mittagong home.
William Gillan Massingham was born in 1840 at Heigham in Norwich, England, and came to Australia in his twenties. He was a hotel licensee when he married Lois in Goulburn in 1873. He then went into partnership as a wholesale grocer and tea merchant in George Street, Sydney.
The couple took up residence on a 102-acre property fronting the Old South Road which they purchased in the name of Lois in 1883 and mortgaged soon after. They named the property ‘Aylmerton’ for the place of origin of the Massingham family near Cromer in Norfolk, England.
Their property had passed through several ownerships. The residence, built in the mid-1870s, was a comfortable, eight-room home with a hallway surrounded by a stone flagged verandah and two small rooms. There was a formal garden of mainly annuals but with English shrubs and exotics.
Soon after purchase, the Massinghams sold a 30-acre portion to William’s brother George, a photographer who lived in Victoria. A two acre block of this portion was then sold for a considerable amount to the Department of Education for a new weatherboard schoolroom which opened in 1885.
William and Lois established a 12 acre orchard – ten acres of apples and two of peaches – surrounded by a vermin-proof fence of split palings. To supplement their income, from 1884 to 1889 Lois advertised “superior farmhouse accommodation for families” at Aylmerton House.
The Massinghams took out a new mortgage on their 72-acre property with Charles Murray, a District Court Judge. As they could not meet payments, ownership was transferred to Murray in 1896, but they continued living on the property until it was sold in 1912.
Aylmerton House and farm was purchased in 1915 by Herbert Hills, a Sydney orchardist. After his death in the early 1930s, his family rented out the land for farming and the abandoned house gradually became derelict.
The name Aylmerton was adopted for the nearby railway station on the Picton-Mittagong main line deviation which opened in 1919 and sub-divisions were offered as Aylmerton Park Estate. Only moderate settlement eventuated and the station closed in 1975.
Ralph Massingham, son of the earlier owners, returned to Aylmerton House in 1979 and described it as follows: “Met with a scene of desolation compared with what I remembered as a boy. A bush fire had swept through the area and nothing was left but the house and a few of the hardiest shrubs. All the fencing and the coach house, barn, stables, workmen’s huts and milking shed had gone. The orchard had either died of old age or been burnt and the house was being used as a barn and stables”.
Aylmerton House is now a luxurious country retreat, taking in guests just as Lois Massingham had done more than 100 years ago.