Category:James Fry (flour-miller)

James Fry 

Australian farmer and flour-miller
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Date of birth	1821 Cassington
Date of death	1903
Country of citizenship	Australia
Occupation	farmer miller
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James Fry

Australian farmer and flour-miller

Born at Cassington, Oxfordshire, England in 1821. The ship Brilliant brought him and his wife Mary, née Gean, to Victoria in 1854. He settled first at Geelong. After experience on the goldfields, he bought a property near Mount Blowhard, about eleven miles (18 km) from Ballarat. Here he started grain-growing on an extensive scale. In 1856 he bought a primitive flour-milling plant at Geelong and erected it on his land. The little mill soon prospered and Fry installed in its place the advanced and complete equipment of the Ascot steam flour-mills at a cost of £25,000.

The extension of farming around the Ballarat goldfield supplied ample grain for the Ascot mill and the local mining population as a ready market.

Fry soon decided to launch his milling enterprise in other parts of the colony. As farming progressed in the Wimmera, and the district was opened by railway, Fry was one of the first millers to take advantage of the new source of supply, setting up branches and sub-agencies in the main townships; by 1880 his firm had additional mills at Ascot, Ballarat, Horsham, Kingston, Natimuk, St. Arnaud, Dimboola and Donald.

'Fry's Five Stars Flour' was a household word in Australia in the 1880s and 1890s.

After he retired from flour-milling, he developed new wheat varieties, and was one of the first farmers to use dry-farming techniques. This demonstrated the potential for wheat-growing on the Wimmera plains.