St Marys, South Australia
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St Marys Adelaide, South Australia |
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Looking east along Daws Road. St Marys is to the right (south)
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| Population | 2,519 (2006 census) | ||||||||||||||
| Postcode(s) | 5042 | ||||||||||||||
| LGA(s) | City of Mitcham | ||||||||||||||
| Federal Division(s) | Boothby | ||||||||||||||
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St Marys is a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia, located to the south of the Central Business District. It is bordered by Daws Road (north), South Road (west), Cashel Street (east) and Mill Terrace (south). The suburb is located within the City of Mitcham local government authority. St Marys Park is one of the largest reserves within the suburb and was originally the training ground of the South Adelaide Football Club.
St Marys was first farmed in the 1830s by the Daw and Ayliffe families. They were later joined by Benjamin Babbage, Robert Torrens and Captain William O’Halloran.
Prior to the 1850s, the suburb was named St Marys-on-the-Sturt as, apart from farmhouses and the St Marys Church of England, there were no buildings in the area from Daws Rd to the Sturt River until various shops were established on the northern side of the St Marys church. The suburb was an important wheat growing area for Adelaide until the northern areas of the colony came under cultivation when some of the St Marys properties were replanted with almonds, grape vines and olives.
Daw subdivided the frontage of his property as St Marys Village and built a house on the corner of what is now South Road and Daws Road. In 1852, he sold the house and several hundred acres to Babbage. After Babbage's own home burnt down in 1875, he built a mansion that was known as "Babbage’s castle." Babbage built the mansion using a new building material, concrete, however he used salty water and the mansion immediately began to crumble. The family left the estate in 1896. A two story hotel on the corner of South and Ayliffes Road, the Lady MacDonald Hotel was licensed in 1857. As a result of a spelling error by the sign writer, the hotel displayed the name Lady MacDonnell, an error that persisted for over 70 years. In 1909 the hotel became a temperance hotel and went into decline. In the 1930s it was sold as a home to Ted Grindell, the local council "garbo" until the ruins were demolished in 1966 and replaced with a car dealership.
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