Samuel McWilliam

Story

SAMUEL MCWILLIAM Founder of the ‘McWilliam\’s Wines’ family

Samuel McWilliam was born on the 15th April 1830 at Raloo, near Larne, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He was the second son of a family of six boys and one girl from the marriage of Samuel McWilliam, snr. (1800-1882) and Elizabeth Crawford (1801-1872). His great-great grandfather had been an immigrant from Wigtonshire in the south west of Scotland and had settled in Larne around 1700. Samuel arrived in Melbourne on the 2nd November 1857 aboard the ‘Morning Light’ and was typical of the more than half a million immigrants who arrived in Victoria during the main period of the gold rush. He was following the strong pioneering tradition of his uncles and, in particular, his older brother, Crawford, who had immigrated to America eight years before.

Samuel became a land holder in the parish of Denison, County of Rosedale, near Sale. In 1863 he married Martha Steele (1841-1889), only daughter of the second marriage of a Martha Saunders (nee Pulsford, who immigrated from Tiverton, Devonshire) and an Edmund Steele, a pardoned convict who had been originally convicted and transported for ‘machine breaking’ during the last of the labourers\’ revolts in Southern England and had arrived in Van Diemen\’s Land on the ‘Eliza’ on the 29th May 1831. Samuel and his family of six sons and one daughter left the Gippsland area in 1875 and settled on pastoral land on the northern edge of Corowa where he planted his first vines in 1877. He became a leading member of the ‘Corowa Vine and Fruit Growers\’ Association’ and an acquaintance of Dr. Henry John Lindeman, an earlier pioneering vigneron of the area. Samuel\’s wife, Martha, died on the 18th May 1889 at the age of 48 and left nine children, the youngest being only six years old.

Within two years, Samuel retired to Sydney taking his young daughters with him and leaving the ‘Sunnyside’ vineyard and winery in the hands of two of his sons, John James and Thomas and his eldest daughter, Eliza Jane, who also turned her hand to winemaking.

Samuel died on the 12th June 1902 in Sydney and was buried in the ‘Pioneer Cemetery’ in Corowa with his wife. It was to be his third eldest son, John James McWilliam (1868-1951), who continued the winemaking tradition eventually leaving Corowa and establishing his own vineyard at Junee around 1896 and subsequently the ‘Markview’ winery in 1904. In 1913, John James McWilliam (‘JJ’) and his eldest son, Laurence John (‘Jack’) took up two adjacent irrigation blocks in the newly opened Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area near the village of Hanwood. From these vineyards and the Hanwood winery, built in1916, was to flourish the ‘McWilliam\’s Wines’ family who, 150 years after the arrival of Samuel McWilliam, are into to their sixth generation of winemaking.

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