3.1 The Public Buildings

Churches and Schools at Langwarrin, Carrum Downs and Baxter

Churches have played an important role in the history of these areas, particularly during the present century. As early as 1895, the Langwarrin Methodist Church purchased a wooden building, reputedly built in Beaumaris in 1857. This was used as the Langwarrin State School 3531 from 1907 and 1911, and then as a church until 1920. After it was demolished, material was used for stables and sheds for a new church opened in that year.1

The Anglican Church also had associations with this building and with the Langwarrin Military Camp. In 1915 Anglican services at the new township of Langwarrin near the railway station were held in the Langwarrin State School. In that year five acres of land was purchased on the north-east corner of Warrandyte and North Roads (the site of the present St. Thomas' Church). In 1918, it was proposed to move a building, the Church Hall at the Military Reserve, on to the Warrandyte Road site. Anglican services had been conducted at the camp in this League of Soldiers Friends Church Hall since 1915. A Langwarrin parishioner in 1959, Dr Neville Shute Norway, the well-known novelist, was particularly interested in the Camp and the Anglican Church's associations with it.

In April 1919, the Church Hall was taken down and sections of it stored on the Warrandyte Road site. This small hall (27 x17 feet) was re-erected and dedicated on 21 November 1920 as the Church of St. Thomas. It became the Sunday School when a new church, designed by the architect, W. Widdows, was dedicated on 29 August, 1964.2 Another district Anglican church, St. Lukes, is associated with the Brotherhood of St. Laurence Settlement at Carrum Downs. The Anglican Church is associated, too, with Woodleigh, the senior school of St. Paul's Co-Ed School at Frankston, located on Golf Course Road at Baxter. Woodleigh stands to the east of the Mulberry Hill property. It is considered to have great heritage value for its "semi-rural surrounds" as part of a landscape of "small pastures and wooded areas" where trees "shelter well-established residences".3

The first school was opened at Langwarrin following a petition by the Education Department on 2 . December, 1889 from concerned residents living in the vicinity of the Military Reserve. The petition was signed mainly by farmers with a couple of railway workers and E. Sullivan, caretaker at the "Camp Ground Langwarrin", who had eight children of school age. A site was chosen on the Langwarrin Defence Ground and a school was opened there on 27 May , 1890. It was known as SS3023, or the Langwarrin Railway Station School. The school was burned out in, 1905.4

Meanwhile, in 1902, a new school named the Mornington Junction School, was established on the corner of McClelland Drive and Golf Links Road, next door to the present Mulberry Hill property.

25 Carrum Downs public hall, the centre of the old Carrum Downs community.

In 1919 Mornington Junction changed its name to Baxter. Known as SS3203 Baxter, the school was moved in 1954 to its present site on the six cross-roads at Baxter, a more central location in the growing township. More classrooms were added in the late 1950s and early 1960s, until it had six classrooms in 1964.5

Another school was established within the district on 1 January 1907 in a leased Methodist Church, known at first as Langwarrin North S.S. 3531. In 1910 a two-acre site was purchased in Warrandyte Road and a building costing 328 pounds was erected there in 1913. There were a number of additions to the Langwarrin School made from the 1930s to the 1960s.6 A new brick veneer primary school was opened at Langwarrin on 6 July 1970. The site of the old school is now an arboretum and bird sanctuary.7