Oakleigh

Built for Dan Jones and completed in early 1887. At the time, the residence was described as a mansion and the land on which it stood had been purchased “at a very high price”. As built, it had four rooms downstairs and four upstairs, a balcony on each side at the upper level, and a detached kitchen with servants room attached, wash house, coach house and stables. Early photos who that the balustrading around the lower verandah was originally iron lace.

The first members of the Jones family to arrive in Redbank Plains were Lewis and Martha who came from Wales in 1864. Lewis started growing cotton but later turned to grazing and horse breeding. His son Dan married Bess Josey and they built Oakleigh, apparently while Dan had aspirations to enter Parliament. The house was later owned by his younger brother Henry who developed the very successful Mel Bonum apiary there. He imported Italian bees and produced a magazine and a catalogue of bees and bee-keeping equipment which became institutions in the industry. He was President of the Queensland Bee-keepers Association 1904-1920. He established a factory to build bee-keeping equipment (on the site of the present-day Woogaroo Hotel), and set up a sawmill in Mill Street Goodna to cut timber for bee boxes and for general purposes. The family also sold mangoes each summer from the grove of trees planted there.

The most famous visitor to his apiary was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1921.

Timber house with steeply-pitched roof and attic level. The attic rooms have french doors opening onto small timber balconies with a curved corrugated galvanised iron roof and broomstick balustrading. The lower level has an encircling verandah, to which a later extension has been added. The original iron lace balustrading has been replaced with timber and the original exposed stud framing has been covered with chamferboards. The house has a brick chimney.