Court House Hotel 2023Dean Franklin Not every stop on the Shamrock Trail has kept its original name, and stop six is a case in point. The Court House Hotel, on the corner of Marsden and Pudman Streets, started life in 1853 as the Crown Inn, more than a decade before it had anything to do with a courtroom. The land was bought in 1852 by John and William Byrnes, of Parramatta, who had a hotel built there before selling the property to John Taylor Preston in July 1857 for £1250. The inn itself had already been licensed in 1853, to Tom Preston, brother to the man who would go on to buy the land. That original building faced Pudman Street and held six bedrooms, two parlours, a bar and tap room, a six-stall stable and what was recorded at the time as an "excellent well of water". A slab and shingle cottage on the site was let to Mr Richards, the town's chief police constable. The Crown Inn changed hands, and in October 1866 it changed its name. New owner Ben Long renamed it the Court House Hotel after it began standing in as Boorowa's first courthouse, while a permanent courthouse was still being built. That permanent building, designed by colonial architect James Barnet and completed in January 1886 — still stands today as the Old Court House, now home to the visitor information centre. It is a different building altogether to the pub that borrowed its name, worth keeping straight given the two are often assumed to be one and the same. Ben Long sold the hotel to William Corcoran in 1879 for £1650. When Corcoran died in 1883, his widow, Johanna, kept the hotel running until her own death in 1904, and the Corcoran family held onto it until 1938, when it was sold to Tooheys Pty Ltd. The building known to Boorowa today dates largely from 1908, when a new two-storey hotel went up on the site, incorporating the corner's two-storey shop. Of its 21 rooms, seven bedrooms were built along a balcony that wrapped a short distance around into Marsden Street. Further additions followed in 1912, when two offices were added on the hotel's southern side and the balcony extended to match, before some of the older sections were demolished in 1937 to make way for eight bedrooms built for local solicitor A.E. Page. The balcony itself came down in 1941, giving the hotel close to the form it holds today. By 1939, the pub had already worked its way through 14 different licensees since the 1866 renaming. Today the building still trades as the Boorowa Court House Hotel and Motel, on Marsden Street, its run as a hotel stretching back to the Byrnes brothers' original 1852 land purchase, and by most accounts remaining the oldest hotel site in town still used for that purpose.
