In the 1840s prominent Wesleyan layman Thomas Wheaton Bowden built three neighbouring houses on Glebe Point Road on blocks subdivided from the Boissier Estate. Elmville remains but is obscured by shopfront additions. Hawthorn was demolished ca. 1991. Bowden’s own three-storey home was Salem House (an abbreviation of “Jerusalem”, reflecting its owner’s religious background). It stood where the Toxteth Hotel is now located.
Thomas Wheaton Bowden was the eldest of ten children of Thomas Bowden who was brought from London in 1812 by the Reverend Samuel Marsden to be master of a charity school. In 1823 Jane Bowden married solicitor George Allen and four years later Thomas junior married Susannah Kendall (aunt of the poet Henry Kendall). In contrast to the increasing prosperity of his Toxteth Park brother-in-law, Bowden ran into financial difficulties soon after Salem House was completed in 1842. In 1848 he was declared bankrupt. George Allen bought the house and rented it out. Thomas Bowden switched jobs from ironmonger to auctioneer and moved with his family to Woollahra, and then to Parramatta.
By 1869, when architect George Allen Mansfield moved in, the 20-room Glebe mansion had been renamed Lynedoch. In 1881 it was put up for auction together with eight lots at its rear. In 1887 it was demolished and replaced by a set of seven two-storey terraces fronting Glebe Point Road and a line of single-storey terraces on Ferry Road. Subsequently, three of the houses were knocked down to make way for the Toxteth Hotel and a further two for a drive-through bottle shop.
Two of the Glebe Point Road terraces remain behind shopfront additions. A Salem House brick well survives in the cellar of the Toxteth Hotel.
