George Witherage Cotton

George Witherage Cotton (1821–1892) was a South Australian land dealer and Member of the South Australian Legislative Council. He was especially notable for being a champion of a scheme in South Australia to put working men onto small blocks of land (around 20 acres) on which they could carry out agricultural production.

Cotton was born on 4 February 1821 at Staplehurst in Kent, England to Samuel and Lydia Cotton. He was apprenticed to a carpenter and studied at Wesley College, Sheffield for two years. After working in London he migrated with his wife, Lydia, and his parents to South Australia aboard the Athenian, arriving in March 1849. His wife and son died shortly after their arrival and later in 1849 he married Elizabeth Mitchell with whom he had nine children.

Upon arriving in South Australia, Cotton worked as a carpenter at Willunga and store-keeper on Hindmarsh Island. He then moved to Adelaide in 1862 and went into business as a land agent, becoming quite wealthy.

In 1865 Cotton called a meeting of laymen of the Wesleyan Church to consider the purchase of a site for a Wesleyan college in Adelaide. This was to become Prince Alfred College, one of the most prominent schools in Adelaide, and Cotton was the founding Secretary, a position he held for twenty years. In 1875, he was the first to import typewriters to Australia.

In 1879 Cotton retired from real estate, leaving the business to his clerk Edward Andrew Devonshire Opie, an "old scholar" of Adelaide Educational Institution, and his son George Samuel Cotton, who followed his father as secretary of Prince Alfred College.

In 1882 (at the age of 61), Cotton was elected to the Legislative Council. In the depression years following he took an interest in the unemployed and in land reform. Cotton developed a working men's blocks scheme in which the government would offer blocks of up to 20 acres (8.1 ha) of crown land at low rents. The hope was that income from such blocks would eventually be adequate to support a family, forming the basis of a new society of independent producers and co-operative associations.

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