John Hunter of Barnhill · Bogstown.com
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John Hunter of Barnhill
1836–1916
A Donegal farmer’s son who crossed the world to the Australian goldfields, struck it rich, and came home to build a great house near Letterkenny.
John Hunter was born about 1836, one of the many sons of Alexander Hunter, a farmer near Letterkenny in County Donegal. His mother was Prudence Mortimer, a granddaughter of the old Donegal family of Dill, her mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Dill, having married John Mortimer. It was a large, close Presbyterian household of farming stock, and like so many such families in the middle of the nineteenth century, it would be scattered across the world by the pull of Australian gold.
The eldest brother, Joseph, went first, in the 1850s, and the letters he sent home drew the others after him, John, then William, then Robert. At a mine near Bendigo, in Victoria, called the Garden Gully United, the brothers held their shares when wiser-seeming men were selling theirs for the price of a dinner. The reef came in, and it made them rich beyond anything a Donegal farm could dream. In time the family built a mining and pastoral fortune in the colony, holding the vast Burnewang Park estate near Elmore and raising a name that buyers took as a mark of quality.
A Bogstown connection
Not every Hunter went to the diggings. John’s brother Henry stayed at home, and in 1857 he married Matilda Laird of Carrygawley, sister of Ann Laird, the wife of William Laird of Bogstown. That marriage is what joins the Hunters to the Laird story told on these pages. Henry and Matilda’s son, John Laird Hunter, later emigrated to Melbourne, and it was he who, in 1886, gave young Richard Laird of Bogstown a familiar face to sail towards on the far side of the world.
The circle closed
Of all the brothers, it was John who came home for good. He sold his interests in the Garden Gully, gathered up the fortune the mine had made him, and carried it back across the world to the ground he had left with nothing. Near Letterkenny he bought his land and built a fine house, which he called Barnhill, and there he lived out his years an Irishman again, raising a family of eleven children within sight of the hills he was born under. One daughter, Matilda Hastings Hunter, married Dr Thomas Patterson; it was a daughter who was with him at the end.
John Hunter died at Barnhill on 23 August 1916, of a cerebral haemorrhage, a burst aneurysm, at the age of eighty. He had gone out a poor man’s son and come back a rich one, and unlike so many who left Donegal in those years, he had the rare good fortune to close the circle and be buried in the ground he was born on. Barnhill still stands above Letterkenny. It is a golf club now, and its members walk the fairways of a house that a farmer’s son bought back from the far side of the earth with Australian gold.
Sources: the Hunter & Laird family papers; the Dill genealogical tree (W. J. Young); “Bendigo and Vicinity” (biographical sketch of William Hunter); and the Letterkenny district register of deaths, 1916 (John Hunter, Barnhill).
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