The man behind the original Belmont, Henry Newcomen, 1860 to 1884
St John of God Hospital at North Richmond occupies the grand mansion of Belmont Park, built by Philip Charley in 1892.
It also occupies the central portion of the major grazing property called Belmont which had been developed by Archibald Bell between 1807 and 1837.
Bell’s own homestead complex was close to the present hospital buildings and overlooked the rich paddocks rolling down to the Hawkesbury River.
Belmont stayed in the Bell family until 1866, when Henry Newcomen bought the estate for £4250 and made it his main residence until his death in 1884.
Henry Newcomen was an Englishman who had come to Australia as a free settler and established himself as a grazier in the far north of NSW. His principal sheep station was Angledool, 75,000 hectares on the Narran River north of Lightning Ridge.
In 1855 Newcomen had married Emily Baldwin, a member of an ex-convict Wilberforce family which had diversified into grazing in the Hunter and beyond. Henry served as a government inspector of sheep in the Hunter area in the 1850s.
But from 1866 onwards his home was the Hawkesbury where he was soon a local magistrate and a churchwarden at St Peter’s Anglican Church in Richmond.
Newcomen lived in Bell’s old house and did not make any substantial alterations to it. He clearly had strong feelings for old Belmont. His love of the place was shown immediately in 1867 when the first of his children to be born at North Richmond was christened William Belmont Newcomen.
Moreover, William’s eldest son, born at Mudgee in 1895, was named Peter Belmont Newcomen and his second son, William, also had Belmont as a middle name.
Emily died at Belmont in 1871 and Henry remarried in 1873, starting a new family with Letitia Moore, who survived Henry.
On his death in 1884 Henry had substantial land assets and employed managers both at Belmont and at Angledool.
Angledool was valued at more than $8 million in modern money and Belmont, where he ran 240 cattle, 100 sheep, 10 horses and 30 pigs, was valued at $2 million.
The wealth was to some degree illusory because Newcomen was heavily burdened with debt, and Belmont remained in his family for only five more years. Henry’s widow Letitia continued in residence until 1887 when her dress caught alight and she died of her injuries.
The inventory of Letitia’s estate showed that she had negligible assets of her own. Her most valuable possession was her piano at Belmont, estimated to be worth a handsome £55.
The estate had passed to the eldest son, William Belmont, who was still a teenager.
In the year after his stepmother’s death, he tried to subdivide Belmont, but, when the auction failed to command much interest, he sold the entire estate to Philip Charley in 1889. Within three years Charley had commissioned paintings of old Belmont, demolished the house and built his own grandiose mansion nearby.
