No. 1609 - Cullenswood - Christchurch Sunday School (1850)

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This article is one of a series about buildings associated with Tasmania’s historical churches. These buildings include Sunday schools, parish halls, convents, schools and residences of the clergy. Ancillary buildings are often overlooked and rarely feature in published histories. My aim is to create a simple record of these buildings, including of those that no longer exist.

Cullenswood is located about two kilometres west of St Marys in the Fingal Valley. All that remains of the former village is its church and rectory. Christchurch at Cullenswood is the legacy of Robert Vincent Legge. Legge arrived in Van Diemans Land in 1827 and shortly after took up a 1200 acre land grant on the Break O’ Day Plains. He named his estate Cullenswood, after his family home in Ireland.

Legge was a devout Anglican and in gratitude for his good fortune he built a church at Cullenswood in 1847. [See No. 173] Legge also built a rectory and secured its first priest, his nephew, Dr Samuel Parsons. Little is known about the Sunday School building which is no longer standing. It was built in 1850 and Legge regularly participated in the religious instruction of children attending Sunday school.

The buildings historical record is very thin and I have come across only a handful of articles in local newspapers which make passing reference to the school. An article from 1857 notes that the school was closed as the church was without a minister. In 1876 another report states that Robert Legge was presented with a Bible in recognition of “his untiring zeal on behalf of the Sabbath school”. In 1887 another report records a fundraising concert which took place in Mr Napiers store at St Marys “devoted to the liquidation of expenses incurred in providing seats…for the Cullenswood Sabbath-school”. The last report about the school dates to a 1926 report on Anglican church property that records that the Cullenswood Sunday school had been “re-roofed and a fence erected”.

It is not recorded when the Sunday school closed or when the building was demolished.


Cullenswood Sunday School - Weekly Courier, 20 December 1923


Christchurch at Cullenswood - Libraries Tasmania LPIC147-2-331


 Sources:

The Hobart Town Advertiser, Wednesday 8 September 1858, page 3
The Mercury, Saturday 23 December 1876, page 1
The Tasmanian, Saturday 5 November 1887, page 22
Weekly Courier, Monday 20 December 1923, page 27
Examiner, Wednesday 21 April 1926, page 4






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