Henry Yelverton (merchant)

Henry Yelverton (1821 – 1 April 1880) was an Australian sawmiller and timber merchant.

Yelverton was born in London, England; his father, Edward, was a jeweller. He went to the United States aged 18, having originally planned to study medicine, and was employed by a whaling ship that took him to Western Australia in 1845. He worked near Perth, employing sawyers by 1849. In 1853 he was a cooper and had bought a brig with a business partner to transport timber to the eastern colonies. He moved to the Vasse River area near Busselton in 1855. In 1858 he built a steam sawmill at Quindalup that provided timber from jarrah and tuart forests to the eastern colonies, British India, and Ceylon and employed up to 120 ex-convicts.^[1] He built a jetty, roads, bridges and a horse tramway for his forestry business, as well as Busselton's first courthouse.^[1][2] His company began the construction of Busselton Jetty in 1864 and 1865.^[3] He was also involved in the Castle Bay Whaling Company, was licensee of the Race Horse Inn at Fremantle, and smuggled tobacco for extra income.^[1][4] Customs officials heavily fined him for his tobacco-smuggling activities, but this did not affect his local standing; local consensus was that "he had done much more for the district than the government ever had".^[1] In 1865, he had exported almost £11,000 of timber out of the £15,693 worth of the material exported in the entire colony of Western Australia.^[1] His financial situation was unstable, however; he was bankrupt in September 1862 and May 1866, and was apparently struggling financially in 1868 and 1872–73. In January 1880 he was seriously injured in a logging accident; he died on 1 April of that year, aged 58.^[1]

He married Mary Marshall, the daughter of a clerk, on 7 June 1853 at St George's Anglican Church; the couple had two sons and nine daughters. His son Henry John, who later became a state politician, took over his father's timber business after his death. It was eventually bought out by the Imperial Jarrah Wood Corporation, which was subsequently merged into Millars.^[1]

The locality of Yelverton is named after him.^[5]