Decline
By the late 1820s, this small, solid 3-roomed brick cottage was transformed into a smart country house, surrounded by 'pleasure grounds', orchards and almost 1,000 acres (4 km²) of semi-cleared lands. Elizabeth Farm remained in Macarthur family ownership for another six decades. Following Elizabeth’s death in 1850, the homestead garden grew wild, while paddocks, fields and fences were neglected. Tenants, forever complaining, occupied cottages on the estate under various arrangements. Finally, debts and complications in winding up the 40 year lease of a woollen mill led to the sale of Elizabeth Farm in 1881. From 1904 to 1968, Elizabeth Farm, on less than 5 acres (20,000 m2), was owned by the Swanns - a large, progressive and well known local family of Quakers, whose appreciation of the old farmhouse led to its preservation. The property was acquired by the State Government in 1979 and, after several years of restoration, was transferred to the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales in 1983. The Macarthur’s early cottage has survived intact, enveloped within later extensions, making it Australia’s oldest European dwelling. The current museum was launched in 1984. '
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Farm, History
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My opposition [to interviews] lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)