The country was a wilderness of bush, with only a few mud houses in York, and only one or two children, of which Mr Henry Parker, Member for Perth, was one, and who has been such an honor to the district.

The roads were mere bush tracks, and the settlers, both masters and men, had to cart their produce from 60 to 100 miles, over them, in the dust and heat in summer, and through bogs and ruts in wet winter.

[4] The initial result of all this railway construction was to throw open the Avon Valley and land to the east to commercial wheat farming on a large scale.

Between 1890 and 1894 they came from Albany and Fremantle to York by train, stocked up with provisions and set off by cart or on foot for the Goldfields, using the track and wells established by Charles Cooke Hunt during 1865/66.

[6][7][8] When the Eastern Railway was extended to Southern Cross in 1894, it was done so via Northam rather than York even though it was the largest inland town in Western Australia at the time.

[11] The building is possibly the earliest example of Federation Arts and Crafts style in Australia,[12] emulating William Morris, for whom the ideal in house design was to copy the “ageless domestic architecture” of Bibury in Gloucestershire, a Cotswald hamlet.