Buildings/whitehouse.html
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House of Dr A.T. White
1908, 141 Canning Highway, adjacent to St Peter's (Anglican) church in (former) Canning Road. Later a Catholic presbytery (literally a 'place for old men', but actually a dwelling house for priests).
This cropped '1907' photo from the Battye Library (this is only a small part of a much larger image) taken from Richmond Hill shows White's house on the left with St Peter's in the middle.
My source for the '1908' date of the house is the Fremantle Library (see the page for the church). My source for the photo (Charlesworth) gives it (the date of the photo) as '1907', but shows the house. One of them is obviously wrong - or possibly both.
The Library's caption on a photo (shown on this page) reads in part: "The adjacent building was erected in 1908 for Dr A.T. White and later used as a presbytery for Roman Catholic Clergy. The ornate residence had attractive figures modelled by A. Burvill."
The East Fremantle Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception is across the way on the corner of Preston Point Road, at 152 Canning Highway, opposite the corner of Silas Street, and the church owned the land there from 1941, so it made sense for them to acquire a large house nearby to house its clergy—date unknown, but perhaps after 1941.
A still cropped photo of the photo, but showing more context. The (Royal) George Hotel is at the left, near the top, on the corner of Duke and George Streets.
Photo courtesy City Library ref. no. 4175, taken 1960s by Kerry Reilly, showing the White house, which was by then the RC Presbytery and demolished in 1970. The Richmond Shopping Centre on the left was demolished in 1979. The house had lost its tower some time after 1954.
For other photos showing parts of the White house/presbytery, see the page for the Richmond Theatre.
References and Links
Charlesworth, Helene 1997, Small but Strong: a Pictorial History of the Town of East Fremantle 1897-1997, Town of East Fremantle: 84.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 6 October, 2021 and hosted at freotopia.org/buildings/whitehouse.html (it was last updated on 15 April, 2024). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.