regularly played in the Squares at both Richmond and Windsor (McQuade Park). There was no authority responsible for the development of Wilberforce Square before 1895 and as a result there is little documentation about its first 85 years. Since the Square is unlikely to have been fenced in the nineteenth century, it is likely that cattle, sheep, horses and pigs would often have grazed there, en route to the common beyond Wilberforce Cemetery. Fencing did not entirely preclude grazing, for horses were agisted in the Square as late as the 1940s. On 14 June 1895 Macquarie's Great Square was reclassified as a Recreation Ground. The new survey determined its area as 8 acres 3 rods 26 perches, very close to the present official extent of 3.607 hectares. The area remained Crown land and the Department of Lands, as was usual, appointed a group of Trustees to oversee its administration. Four local worthies were appointed as Trustees on 22 October 1895. Stephen John Dunstan and Reuben Greentree were members of old farming dynasties in the district, Lewis Simpson was the local tanner and George Nicholls another local farmer. In November 1895, these four Trustees were joined by a fifth, Edward Thomas Bowd, the third generation of his family in Wilberforce and the grandfather of the well-known local historian, Doug Bowd. The area around Wilberforce had no provision for a local government authority until the Shires Act was passed in 1906. The five members of the Provisional Council of Colo Shire, including two of the Trustees, Dunstan and Bowd, met for the first time on 13 June 1906 and Bowd became one of the six elected members of the Council in December of that year. Colo Shire Council met in Wilberforce, but it was responsible for a rural area of 3,200 square kilometres with a scattered population of around 4,000 in 1910. Its main preoccupations were road and ferry maintenance and for more than three decades it took no role in running the Recreation Reserve. The Trustees, who had been appointed for life, continued to function. In 1918, when there was an impulse to erect a War Memorial, the chair of the local Patriotic League was E. T. Bowd, while another Trustee, Greentree, was prominent on the committee. The Memorial was erected, however, not in the Recreation Reserve but on the elbow of King Road. When Reuben Greentree died in 1923, the