Yarloop Hotel 1907 Historic Site

The Yarloop Hotel was built on this site in Station Street in 1907.

In 1903 and 1905, a licence application for a proposed Yarloop Hotel was refused, opposed by Millar’s Karri and Jarrah Company and the licensee of the Palace Hotel, but by 1907, Hugh McNeill was granted a publican’s general licence for a new hotel at Yarloop.

Designed by architect Thomas Benjamin Jackson, the Hotel was a large two-storied brick building containing a dining room, drawing room, commercial room, lounge room, and 16 bedrooms. Outbuildings included stabling and motor accommodation.

During the 1907/08 timber workers strike, Yarloop labourers and tradesmen were given many weeks of work helping to build it. The result was an impressive building with a beautiful hand-polished craftsmen-built staircase of solid jarrah.

In 1929, two sticks of gelignite were thrown into the Hotel bedroom of Miss Violet Howell. The fuse scorched her arm as she was sleeping. Violet rushed out before the charge exploded, destroying the room. The alleged offender, Mr James Gent, was taken to Fremantle Hospital suffering from poison, which he self-administered.

It burnt down in 1955, but several remaining interior walls were used to build the replacement hotel. That building, also known as the Yarloop Hotel, sadly burnt down in the 2016 Bushfires.