The Will of Paul Randall, Innkeeper of The Black Horse Inn

The Will of Paul Randall, February 25th,1832, probably in Randall's own hand & signed by him, with witnesses' signatures. Randall had been granted the licence of an inn at Richmond in 1819. The inn was called the Black Horse Prince but it was commonly known as The Black Horse Inn. Many of the business affairs of the Hawkesbury region were conducted & settled at the Black Horse Inn. It is the Inn and the land on which it stands, which are the major assets referred to in the document in which he bequeaths to his daughter and son-in-law. Paul Randall was a convict who arrived in NSW in 1791 on board the 'Admiral Barrington'. Back in England, his brother William had been involved in a robbery, while his wife Mary was also implicated. Mary arrived on the 'Bellona' in 1793. It appears their daughter Margaret (born in 1799) took over the operation of the Black Horse in the late 1820s leading the hotel into its heyday. Margaret had married in 1820 to Dr Henry Seymour, a convict who had arrived in 1817. Following the death of her parents, Mary (1832) and Paul (1834), Margaret inherited the inn. Her parents are both buried at St. Peter's, Richmond. It was during the 1830s that Margaret had constructed, in Windsor Street, a more established two-story building. It is thought that the original single-storey residence remained adjoining the new structure and certainly surviving photographs correspond with this theory. Margaret ran the Black Horse for forty years.