The enterprising sisters

Photo: Queens Hotel

Hard working, hard drinking men from the mills, wharves, ships and farms filled the bars of colonial Maryborough, where a hotel could be found on almost every corner. 

With their boozing and brawling, the pubs were the domain of men and definitely no place for ladies. Except when it came to the Gregory Girls. 

Sisters Sarah, Elizabeth, Margaret and Mary Ann-Maria Gregory were among the original pioneering families who settled Maryborough in the late 1840s. 

Opening the first store in Adelaide Street in the mid-1850s, the sisters continued to establish and run other shops and hotels in the town, including the Queens Hotel on Kent and Adelaide Streets in 1864. Elizabeth also opened Maryborough town’s first music hall next to the hotel. 

An act of piracy, fires, floods and a baby saved from a cesspit are all part of the colourful history of the Gregory sisters who truly earned their reputation as some of the colony’s most enterprising women. 

The Gregory sisters simply rebuilt and carried on when fires destroyed three of their hotels, including the Queens Hotel in the great fire of 1876. 

The sisters’ names will forever be associated with the history of Maryborough’s early retail and hotel trade but they left their biggest footprint in the hearts of the town. 

Between them they were honoured for a number of great virtues, including “extreme hospitality, great kindness, strong free character, charitable acts and many daring exploits”.