St David's Uniting Church is a heritage-listed Uniting church and associated precinct at 51- 53 Dalhousie Street, Haberfield, Inner West Council, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by Simeon Lord, David Ramsay, William Munro, J. A. B. Campbell, Power, Adam, and Munning, Thomas Rowe, and Ferdinand Reuss and built from 1860 to 1900 by Williams, Ravers, Duffy and Cannon. It is also known as St. David's Uniting Church, St Davids Presbyterian Church Precinct and includes the St David's Sunday School/Yasmar School, Ramsay Vault and Ramsay Graveyard. The property is owned by the Uniting Church in Australia. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 19 August 2003.
History
St David's Church and its associated complex lie on part of the known as Sunning Hill Farm, granted in August 1803 to Nicholas Bayly. Bayly, a well-connected member of the New South Wales Corps, had a stormy career in the colony and resigned his commission six weeks after this grant was made. Sunning Hill Farm, portion 257 of Concord parish, occupied the area of present-day Haberfield, from Parramatta Road north to Iron Cove, bounded on the west by what are now Wattle Street and Dobroyd Parade, on the east by the later canal along Hawthorn Parade.
Bayly sold Sunning Hill Farm after only nineteen months, in March 1805, to the ambitious young emancipist Simeon Lord. Earlier in 1805 Lord had gone into partnership with Henry Kable (who already held what became Summer Hill) and James Underwood (who later bought Kable's land). Lord at once changed the name of Bayly's farm to Dobroyde, his preferred spelling of his Yorkshire birthplace.
Lord expanded his land holdings in the area to 600 hectares (1500 acres), with 16 hectares (40 acres) "cleared and divided into paddocks". On the property, just to the south-west of the present St David's, between the later Dalhousie Street and Orpington Street (now Rogers Avenue), Lord built a homestead, described in his advertisement for a lessee in 1816 as: an elegant villa, fit for the reception of a small genteel family, with suitable detached kitchen, dairy, stable, coach house, piggery, cow house and stockyard, together with the most productive garden, containing some of the finest trees in the Colony.
In March 1825 Simeon Lord's daughter, Sarah Ann, married a 31-year-old Scottish doctor, David Ramsay, and the bride's dowry was Dobroyde Estate. Though the settlement of the land was not formally completed until May 1826, the couple moved in to the house at once in 1825 and commenced the building of a new carriage-house, stables and cow-house in December 1825. Ramsay, a graduate in medicine from the University of Edinburgh and a native of Perth, had first visited Australia in 1820 as a ship's doctor on the "Surry" under the captaincy of Thomas Raine. In 1823 Raine and Ramsay (after taking Governor Macquarie back to Britain) settled in Sydney and from 1823 until 1828 ran in partnership a business in the heart of the city, as shipowners, agents, general merchants and woolbrokers.
The failure of the firm of Raine and Ramsay in 1828 encouraged Ramsay (who had given up medical practice) to develop his grazing property on the Fish River and to live more intensively at Dobroyde House. At Dobroyde he developed an important plant nursery and established a new citrus orchard between Ramsay Road and Long Cove Creek, although much of the land down to Dobroyd Point remained uncleared bush, with pockets of development.
The Creation of Dobroyde Estate
Sarah and David Ramsay had eleven children and from the 1830s onwards extended Simeon Lord's Dobroyde House to accommodate the increasing family. They were dedicated Presbyterians and philanthropists. In 1840 they set up the first Presbyterian Sunday School in the colony, using the verandah of the extended Dobroyde House. As the elder Ramsay daughters grew up, they did the bulk of the Sunday School teaching in the 1840s and 1850s
The Sunday School teaching was transferred from Dobroyde House to the nearby Yasmar in the late 1840s. In 1855 Mary Loulsa Ramsay (1826-1914), Dr Ramsay's eldest daughter, married another Scot, Alexander Learmonth (1820-1877), the senior partner in Learmonth, Dickinson and Co, stock and station agents. Soon after their marriage, the couple built their fine house, Yasmar (Ramsay backwards), on the Ramsay estate north-west of Dobroyde House. Alexander Learmonth was 'an intelligent and zealous Presbyterian': he and his wife gave their time and fortune unstintingly to the church.