Generation 1 - Frank Potts I

Frank Potts was born in 1815, three weeks after the Battle of Waterloo. He joined the Royal Navy in 1824 at the age of nine, taking his first commission on Nelson's famous HMS Victory. He sailed around the world surviving on rations of hard ship's biscuits and salted beef before docking in South Australia in the first landing party in 1836. Throughout his time in the Navy Frank had learnt the skills of carpentry, he went to shore with nothing else but a chest of carpentry tools to his name.

He began work in Port Adelaide as a boat builder and became renowned for his fine carpentry skills, even constructing his own ketch, the Petrel. 

He married Augusta Wenzel on Thursday 17th February 1948. Shortly after he sold his boat and home in Port Adelaide in order to become a farmer, purchasing the first sections of land on the fertile Bremer River at Langhorne Creek in 1850. He immediately set about clearing the land and starting farming.

The land Frank selected was rich and fertile and he planted his first vines in 1858, selling wine to Thomas Hardy a few years after. He expanded his holdings to 30 acres in the 1860s and established the now famous Bleasdale Winery.

An Extraordinary Character

One meets with extraordinary characters through life, but I doubt whether his equal could be found. In appearance a stranger would take him to be a poor labourer, with a thin, spare figure and long unkempt hair and invariably wearing his shirt sleeves tucked up. Altogether a most uncouth-looking person, and yet this man is a perfect genius! There is not a single thing mechanical or otherwise undertaken by him which he does not succeed in accomplishing. He is his own builder, carpenter, cooper, smith, shoemaker, and has even manufactured a piano and, being withal a bookworm, his conversation is most interesting and instructive. As a boat builder there is no better in the colony.

Alexander Tolmer
South Australian Commissioner of Police
1852 - 1854