Foster held the run until 1842 when it was taken up by Edward Wilson and James Stewart Johnson until 1846 when Thomas Herbert Power (1801 to 1873) took it on. The property then went from around the Dandenong Creek/Power Road all the way to Berwick. Power was a member of the Legislative Council from 1856 until 1864 and had land in other areas including Hawthorn, and is the source of the name Power Road. When he died in 1873 the value of his Estate was over £40,000. He still owned, according to his Probate papers 1,848 acres (747 hectares) in the Parish of Eumemmerring when he died. Part of his Probate papers are reproduced below. You can see some of alloments in the Eumemmerring Parish Plan, further below.
Part of Thomas Herber Power's Probate papers. listing his Eumemmerring land, valued at £6006. Wills and Probates up to 1925 are digitised and available on the Public Records Office of Victoria website. www.prov.vic.gov.au
Eumemmerring Parish Plan (partial) showing some of the land owned by Thomas Herbert Power.
This is the plan of Grassmere which appeared in The Argus of October 30, 1888. Marked on the map is the proposed railway line to Fern Tree Gully, which never eventuated.
It is highly unlikely McCrae, Foster or Power ever lived in the area, however in the 1850s there were other land sales, especially around the Eumemmerring Creek, of smaller sub-divided blocks and farmers arrived and created a community - the Eumemmerring, Denominational School started in 1858 and two Inns and a race course were established and of course, a bit further east was the Hallam Hotel which began as a general store run by William and Mary Hallam, in the 1860s. These settlers didn't (generally) have roads named after them nor are remembered in any other way but Jean Uhl has listed them, on page 97, in her book, Call back Yesterday: Eumemmering Parish (published by Lowden Press, 1972) and they deserve to be recognised here.
Sources: Call back yesterday: Eumemmering Parish by Jean Uhl (Lowden Press, 1972). The photographs of Foster and Power are from the Parliament of Victoria website www.parliament .vic.gov.au. The Probate record of Thomas Power is from the Wills and Probate Papers digitised by the Public Records Office of Victoria www.prov.vic.gov.au. The Grassmere plan comes from The Argus, available on Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper.
The information on Leslie Foster comes from the Australian Dictionary of Biography on-line at http://adb.anu.edu.au/ The original article was written by Betty Malone.
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