Catherine Elizabeth Dow: Brennan & Geraghty’s customer

 

Catherine Elizabeth Dow held an account with local Maryborough store Brennan & Geraghty’s in the years 1889 and 1890, but quite likely shopped there over a longer period of time.  She resided at 52 Queen Street, just a few short blocks from Brennan & Geraghty’s Store, making it a very convenient place for her to go for household supplies.  The surviving account books record her regular purchases of a range of staples such as sugar, salt, starch, currants, raisins, soda, onions and matches as well as occasional purchases of things like clothes pegs and cups and saucers.  At the time she was mother to four young children ranging in age from infancy to 7 years.  She and husband, Louis Henry Dow, would ultimately have six children.

Catherine arrived in Maryborough as a nine year old from Rawcliffe, Yorkshire with her parents John and Ellen (nee Hodgson) Simpson and five of her ten siblings.  The family sailed into Moreton Bay on the Elizabeth Ann Bright on 5 January 1865 and then continued directly on to Maryborough aboard the Clarence.  John first obtained work as a stockman and general hand with John Eaton, owner of Eaton Vale and Rosehill stations.  Within a few years, he successfully tendered for the position of rate collector for the Maryborough Council and the family made Maryborough their home.  It is believed that their home was on Lennox Street, between Queen and South Streets.
In her later years, Catherine reminisced:

That when [I] first came to Maryborough there was no town here; there were no large stores; bush prevailed on all sides, and the number of residences was small. Many of the houses would hardly be classed as dwellings when compared with many of the fine homes of today. [Maryborough Chronicle, 26 February 1938, pp. 3-4]

Catherine took title to the Queen Street property the day after her marriage to Louis in December 1881 and it was here that she and Louis raised their family.   Her husband Louis was a ship’s engineer who worked on various coastal steamers up and down the east coast ranging between Sydney and north Queensland, which meant he was away from home for long periods of time, leaving Catherine to care for their home and children. 

The successes of her children suggest that she did this admirably.  All six children attended Albert State School and each won prizes for academic or sporting achievement and received commendations for perfect attendance.  The children were also regular attendees at Sunday School at St Paul’s Church.  The two youngest children were still teenagers when their father Louis died suddenly in Gympie in 1910, just shy of his 56^th birthday.

At about this time, Catherine became almost completely confined to the house due to the debilitating effects of illness, and the Queen Street residence became even more of a focus of family life, with visits from her adult children, grandchildren and members of the extended Dow and Simpson family.   Catherine was an accomplished needlewoman with a particular talent for tatting.  She was also an avid reader, borrowing books from the School of Arts, of which she was a long standing subscriber. These pastimes helped to occupy her days when she became less able to go out.

When interviewed in 1938, the day after her 83rd birthday and a few years before her death, Catherine described the great changes she had seen in the town (and the world) in her many years of residence, reflecting that while these changes were both good and bad, on balance she believed the world to be a better place than when she was a girl.

An event that loomed large in her memory was the 1893 flood. She recalled that the water surrounded her home on Queen Street, making it necessary to build a temporary landing to enable the family to reach the street. Only one room was inundated. Many houses were washed off their footings and floated downstream during the flood and the Dow family, fearing that their home might be next, were preparing to vacate the property. Just as a whale boat came alongside the veranda, they noticed that the waters had stilled and watched as the waters receded. A mark indicating the height the water reached remained on the inside wall of the home for many years. 

Catherine died at St Mary’s Hospital in January 1941, a month before her 86^th birthday, Maryborough having been her sole place of residence in Australia.  She was survived by her six children, seven of her eight grandchildren, two of her brothers, and numerous nieces and nephews. 

Brothers-in-law Patrick Brennan and Martin Geraghty established their store at 64 Lennox Street in 1871. The store remained in the same family for 101 years, until its closure in 1972. When the doors closed over 50,000 stock items and the store's trading records remained in situ. The store was acquired by the National Trust in 1975 and opened as a heritage museum. This story was originally written for Brennan & Geraghty's Store Museum as a profiled of one of their many customers.