Cooring Yering - the early years

In the 1880s, the house Cooring Yering was built for Colonel William Forbes Hutton on his property of the same name near Lilydale. William Forbes Hutton had purchased the property in 1871 after serving in the Madras Army in India from 1836. William then purchased additional land nearby, eventually owning more than 1,600 acres. The land was used for grazing cattle and there was also a vineyard, though dairying and sheep were also tried on the property. Small parcels of land were leased to market gardeners. After the death of Eleonora Hutton in 1900 the property was sold, but the house with approximately 100 acres still stands today surrounded by a housing estate.

Early history of the property

In 1849 Rowland Hill took up a selection to the north of what became the township of Lilydale. He commenced clearing land, planted crops, built a single room slab hut with a bark roof and dug a waterhole. 

Thomas Payne purchased the 640 acres comprising Section 23 for £1 per acre at the first land sales in 1852 when Hill could not afford to buy the land. 

John Hill repurchased the property when Payne decided to return to England. In 1857 the land was subdivided with three equal parts sold to their three sons and the rest sold outside the family. The sons farmed the property collectively and called the property Cooring Yering. Initially wheat and other grains were grown in the area but by the mid 1860s such crops were not profitable as the land was overworked and not allowed to lie fallow. A wooden house later replaced Hill’s bark roofed hut.

In Yering grape growing was introduced in the 1850s and expanded in the 1860s.  

In the early 1860s Samuel de Pury bought a section of Hill’s Cooring Yering and planted 10 acres of vines. A letter to the editor in the Argus stated that M de Pury had a vineyard at Cooring Yering. George Hutton states that William Forbes Hutton ‘bought Cooring Yering from a Mr de Pury who had formed the farm and then returned to Switzerland for a holiday, but married and settled down there’. 

Rate books do not conclusively resolve the question of previous ownership of the property but an entry for 1871-72 stated - G De Pury gentleman leasing land owned by Major Hutton freehold part of section 24 £211.