Mount Pleasant Church in July, 2020. |
A Church is Planned for Mount Pleasant, Nunawading (1864-1865)
In August 1864, members of the public staged a meeting in Nunawading at the home of Francis Rooks to discuss their intentions to establish a chapel in the Mount Pleasant district “in connection with the Wesleyan Body” (Fendley, 1965, p. 5). To this end, a public committee sought a grant of Crown land on which “a place of worship in connection with the Wesleyan Methodists of the Richmond Circuit” might be constructed (Fendley, 1965, p. 5). On 26th August 1864, after news had arrived that the application had been successful, a public committee appointed local residents John Matters, Abraham Rooks and Joseph Orr as trustees to accept the grant on the community’s behalf (Fendley, 1965, p. 5). The success of the grant was made possible, in part, due to the efforts of Local Parliamentary Member, Dr. Louis Lawrence Smith, who by the end of 1864, managed to secure “a Crown grant of two acres on a beautiful site on the crown of Scotchman’s Hill with view of wooded hills for miles around, and to the east the [Dandenong Ranges]” (Fendley, 1965, p. 5-6). |
Source: (Fendley, 1965) |
A New Church is Built at Mount Pleasant (1916)
In January 1916, Tweddle’s second wife, Isabel May Tweddle (nee Hunter), an artist and member of both the ‘Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors’ and the ‘Twenty Melbourne Painters Society Inc.’, laid the foundation stone for a new church to be positioned on the “site of the old tennis court” (Tweddle, 2021; Fendley, 1965, p. 24). Following the last service in the old Mount Pleasant chapel, the chapel building was sold for £40 and “carted away to become a packing shed in a Mitcham orchard” (Fendley, 1965, p. 25). The new church was opened on 29th April 1916 and could comfortably accommodate 150 people and tea for the opening event was held in the old chapel (Fendley, 1965, p. 25). Whilst the exact figure donated by Tweddle for the new church is not known, it is estimated to have been “at least half of the cost” (Fendley, 1965, p. 26). Tweddle also exerted his influence on the church’s design; being “responsible for the selection of design of the building inside and out, from the clinker bricks, then a most unusual feature, which he had a reluctant Trust accept, to the shape of the pulpit and the selection, with Mrs. Tweddle, of the carpets” (Fendley, 1965, p. 26). Tweddle departed Mount Pleasant after ten years in 1919, when he subsequently moved to Hawthorn (Fendley, 1965, p. 26). |
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