Place Name
Harriet Mainwaring Ellerker (1760 – September 23, 1842) was the younger sister of Charlotte Ellerker, wife of George Townshend, 2nd Marquess Townshend. She lived at a property called Ellerker House (today’s Old Vicarage School) for more than half a century from 1787 living with her mother Barbara Ellerker (nee Dixon) until she died in 1804. Five years later, Harriet bought the property from the trustee of the Darrell estate, with some adjacent land for £3,311 10s (roughly £827,750 today), adapting it to the fashionable Gothic style around the same time, with turrets, castellations, pointed window arches, and so forth. A weathercock, recorded by Evans, had the date 1809. The price paid for the property was a drop in the ocean for the family’s fortunes who were large landowners around York and Suffolk, in 1787 The Times reported that Roger Mainwaring Ellerker’s estate of the “valuable manors of Risby, Willerby and Stillingfleet, in the County of York, East Riding” had sold for £130,740 (£32,685,000 in today’s values). The house was sold in 1872 and its garden hived off and sold separately for development as the railway had made Richmond commutable for the middle-class. But by 1892 only three houses were occupied, nonetheless the Council approved making-up of the road for use as a public highway.
