Colonial views titled “Courthouse and Scotch Church, Parramatta” show two neighbouring civic buildings near the corner of Church and George Streets: the second Parramatta Courthouse and the Scots’ (Presbyterian) Church, later known as St Andrew’s.
The courthouse was a Greek Revival sandstone building associated with Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis and builders James Houison and Nathaniel Payten, erected in the late 1830s (opened for use in the late 1830s–1840) and extended mid-century. It served until a later courthouse generation replaced it; only fragments (notably a sandstone wall and cell block behind the George Street frontage) survive from the Lewis complex. Some of the old courthouse columns were reused in the Boer War Memorial in Parramatta Park.
The Scotch Church — St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church — was a Victorian Gothic landmark on Church Street. Construction began about 1840 (architect James Hume, with local associations to James Houison; masonry often linked in local writing to David Lennox) and the church was completed in the 1840s. When a larger St Andrew’s opened elsewhere in Parramatta in the 1920s, the old “Auld Kirk” was dismantled and re-erected at McKern Street, Wentworthville, where it was dedicated in 1928.
These images therefore record a nineteenth-century streetscape pairing that no longer stands together in central Parramatta.
