Exchange Hotel, Laidley

Exchange Hotel is a heritage-listed hotel at 134-138 Patrick Street, Laidley, Lockyer Valley Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Eaton & Bates and built in 1902. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.HistoryThe Exchange Hotel at Laidley, a two-storeyed brick building, was constructed in 1902 for publicans Julius and Hansine Jocumsen, and replaced an earlier hotel of the same name on the site. It was erected during one of the most significant growth periods in Laidley's history, and although modest in size and scale, reflects in style and materials the confidence and optimism of a small, prosperous, turn-of-the-century country town.Laidley was established in the 1850s as a transport stop along the main dray route from Brisbane and Ipswich to Toowoomba and the Darling Downs, and following the late 1850s subdivision of the Lockyer Creek floodplains, developed as the centre of a small agricultural district. A village of Laidley, located on the rise just south of the present town, was surveyed in 1858. In the mid-1860s the Southern and Western Railway was constructed about a mile to the north of the village, at which time a second survey of Laidley town blocks, this time near the proposed railway station, was undertaken in 1865. A small township developed around Laidley station during the construction of the railway, but after the gangers moved on or took up farms in the district in the late 1860s, this township consisted of little but the two-storeyed iron station building, and Laidley village to the south remained the principal town.