Albany Hotel, Albany

The claim

A two-storey brick pub near the top of York Street, with a small main bar of timber and pressed tin and a beer garden behind. The press calls it Western Australia's oldest, on a licence said to date from 1836; the state heritage record dates the first hotel here to 1852 and the standing building from 1890. Herbert Hoover signed its guest book about 1900.

What the records show

Two accounts of this corner of York Street are in print and they do not agree, which is the whole of the reason for the grade. The claim, as the Albany Advertiser and the agents selling the freehold put it, is that the site holds Western Australia's first liquor licence of 1836, and the ABC quoted the researcher Suzanne Thompson in 2022 saying the original building was licensed around 1836, became the Horse and Groom and was renamed the Albany Hotel in 1892 — with the reporter's own caveat that records from that era are patchy. The heritage record kept by the City of Albany for the Heritage Council of Western Australia tells it differently and mentions no 1836 at all: Patrick Taylor had a cottage on the land, the original Albany Hotel was built in 1852 by James Cooper on Lot S 108, it decayed into a house known as the Old Stone Jug, and John and Margaret Norrish owned it in the 1880s and gave it the name it has now. That record dates the standing building from 1890, with a refurbishment by Margaret Norrish in 1908, and lists its original and present use as hotel, tavern or inn. It also carries the story the pub is fondest of: a guest book of about 1900 in which a young mining engineer named Herbert Hoover wrote "Not dead, but sleeping". The 1852 hotel is therefore the earliest drinking house here that anything cited supports, and the 1836 licence wants a Western Australian licensing record that nobody has produced. The fuller version of that record was read on 18 September 2026 and it carries a run of licensees the summary leaves out. The Norrishes went to Kojonup and let the house to a Mr Schruth; George Stonell took the lease in 1897; by 1902 John William Young, eldest son of the family Young's Siding is named after, held the licence and kept it until he died in July 1908; and the early proprietors after him run Patrick Hennessey in 1908, C. F. Layton in 1910, L. A. Elsegood in 1914, Richard Scott in 1918, Dick Scott in 1919, Frank Lambert and A. J. Martin in 1922 and Louisa Lewis in 1925. Margaret Norrish's refurbishment of 1908 was built by the local contractor Charles F. Layton, and she still owned the hotel when she died in 1930 aged eighty. The record also says what it rests on, which matters more than any of that: its references are a site visit and assessment made by the consultancy Heritage TODAY in 1999 and the Battye Library's general index in 2000. So the 1852 is a heritage consultant's reading of a library index rather than a licensing record, and the 1836 has no document behind it either. The record was created on 17 March 2000 and last touched on 19 May 2022, and its statement of significance claims less than the press does: one of the oldest still existing licensed hotels in Albany and one of the first built, with no mention of the state. It gives the address as 244-248 York Street, a range where the door number alone is printed above. There is nothing further to read from the register, because the house is not on it: the place record shows a municipal heritage listing, no state registration and no decision of the Heritage Council, so there is no register entry and no assessment paper of the kind the Rose and Crown at Guildford carries. That house's record, read the same way on the same night, shows a state registration of 7 October 1997 with both documents attached, which is the control that the papers would have been found here had they existed.

Dated evidence for Albany Hotel, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1836	Claimed founding	The press
c.1890	Present building	https://inherit.dplh.wa.gov.au/public/inventory/details/786ce777-d220-4fc2-9339-1e80ee67e144
1852	First record of a drinking house here	inherit.dplh.wa.gov.au

What to look for inside

A guest book of about 1900 carries Herbert Hoover's line "Not dead, but sleeping"
Known for a spell as the Old Stone Jug, after the first hotel here fell into disrepair
Called the Freemasons Hotel before it took the town's name

Visiting

Albany Hotel is in Albany, Australia, at 244 York Street, Albany, Western Australia. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

facebook.com Directions in your maps app