From the Maitland Mercury report:
There’s not a lot known about the little slab cottage standing on the side of the road in the tiny hamlet of Woodville.
But as the building falls victim to the passing years, artist Val Anderson has decided to capture its history as a reminder of a time gone by.
Mrs Anderson has sketched the building – known as Pioneer Cottage – as part of the 200th anniversary of the Woodville community. The sketch will be raffled off as part of the celebrations to be held later this year.
“The cottage is lovely, it really is, but it’s really falling down,” Mrs Anderson said.
Thought to have been built in the mid 1870s and situated between the Woodville School of Arts Hall and Iona Public School, the cottage is the original home of bootmaker Peter Pomfrett and his wife.
Mr Pomfrett was also a handyman and undertook jobs for the School of Arts hall.
“Pomfrett was later joined by a Mr Harden whose descendant, Tom ‘Poppa’ Harden, came to live in the cottage in 1903, aged 12 years, and was the last to live in the cottage,” Mrs Anderson wrote in her
history of the cottage.
Article by Emma Swain available at Maitland Mercury, 04 July, 2012.
