Cooma Cottage is a heritage-listed former farm and tuberculosis sanatorium and now house museum and historic site at Yass Valley Way, Marchmont, Yass Valley Shire, New South Wales, Australia. It was built from 1830 to 1837 by Cornelius and Rebecca O'Brien. It is also known as Hamilton Hume's House, Humedale Stud, and New Nordrach Institute for Consumption. The property is owned by the National Trust of Australia (NSW). It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 1 March 2002.
It is one of the oldest surviving rural houses in Yass, New South Wales. It has historic significance as a relatively intact complex of rural buildings. It has a variety of significant natural and built elements, including an example of an early tree called the Picconia, a relative of the olive and rare in Australia, which is almost extinct in its native Canary Islands.
Cooma Cottage stands as evidence of what the first settlers built for themselves, their families and servants. The handmade bricks and crafted woodwork are the result of local skills and manufacturing. The cottage grew from a bungalow through a series of additions over the 19th century. The cottage has important heritage values as the home of Hamilton Hume for more than 30 years from 1839, after he ended his travels and became a grazier. It is a valuable part of the early development of the merino wool industry in Australia.
History
Overland explorer Hamilton Hume (1797-1873) was the first European to reach the Yass district around the Yass River in 1821. He returned to the area in 1824 while on an expedition to Geelong (Port Phillip) with Captain William Hovell. Hume was subsequently granted a parcel of land in the area which he took up in 1829.
The 100 acres on which Cooma Cottage is situated was originally part of 960 acres granted to pastoralist Henry O'Brien in 1829. In 1833 100 acres in the south-east corner of Henry O'Brien's grant was transferred to W. H. Broughton for Mrs Rebecca O'Brien (Broughton's daughter), wife of Cornelius O'Brien, Henry's brother.
The original cottage was quite refined: an archetypal colonial bungalow of diminutive scale, it formed the opposite front to the entrance and faced north over the Yass River. It was the garden front of this extraordinary country house. The timber cottage had been built by the Anglo-Irish O'Brien brothers, pastoralists of note, and was the home of Cornelius, while Henry lived to its west at the still-surviving Duoro.
In 1837 Thomas Walker described it as a "very nice and commodious cottage, very well furnished and with everything comfortable about it; the grounds and gardens nicely laid out, but as yet quite in their infancy".
Hamilton Hume purchased the 100 acres from Henry, Rebecca and Cornelius O'Brien in June 1839. Hume, it is said, was in love with the spot and had, in fact, camped there in 1824 on his epic overland journey to Port Phillip with Hovell.
Hume was to live at Cooma Cottage for the rest of his life and it was he who added some 20 rooms to the house in fits and starts over, at least, the next 20 years. While the whole eventually came together as a Palladian composition centred on the portico it was, in fact, a conglomerate mess of uncomfortable rooms, meanly lit and with a plan which depended almost entirely on going outside in the cruel winters of the Yass plains. Except for the handsome stables block, thought to be designed by the Goulburn architect James Sinclair, nothing Hume built could be described as fine. With the exception of the kitchen block, it is hard to know what these rooms were used for; storage and perhaps strangers' rooms for putting up guests and of course rooms for employees. Hume and his wife were childless and presumably made use of the original O'Brien rooms with their pretty north-facing verandah and elegant French casements, almost like bookcase doors, opening onto it.
The name "Cooma" is intriguing and is said to derive from the diminutive of County Murray (Co. Mur) in which region it lies. The main street of Yass is called Comur Street, pronounced like the property. The Humes seem to have simply used the name "Cooma" and there are numerous letters simply headed "Cooma, Yass".
A list of plants obtained by Hume from Camden Park nursery in 1850 include a number of mulberry trees, white figs and two Moorepark apricots, with 12 common laurel trees and a selection of flowering plants, while a Macarthur List identifies early roses. Hume had extensive vineyards at Cooma Cottage in the 1860s.
Hume enlarged his holding in 1862 by purchasing 34 acres, 7 perches from W. W. Billyard.