I'm a simple-minded sort of a bloke and I have long wondered why the Iona Hotel was in Garfield.
When I started trying to find the answer I began to wonder, also, why it took so long for Garfield to get a hotel at all.
The 1900 Municipal Gazetteer lists Garfield as a railway siding forty five and a half miles from Melbourne. The stationmaster was also the postmaster and the population was given as 100. That was pretty much all, but the 1908 Sands and McDougall Commercial Directory does one better, or worse, by not mentioning Garfield at all. Hotels were usually listed among the facilities of each township.
Neither publication mentioned Iona at all. Nor a hotel in either place.

The locals decided to do something about that and raised a petition for a hotel in the new Iona Riding (1903) of the fairly new Shire of Pakenham. The laws of the day allowed for eight licences in the shire and there were only seven hotels.
George Ellis was ready with plans and specifications and he got the licence in December 1903. The hotel was open for business in March 1904, a very rapid result given the description of it at the time. The South Bourke and Mornington Journal, which ran from 1877 to 1927 was first published in Richmond and then in Dandenong, where it was to become the Dandenong Journal in 1927. It ran a report on the new hotel which was fulsome in its praise, as was usual for such things in those days.
"The structure comprises 29 rooms, including a spacious bar room, parlours, commercial room, dining room, drawing room, sixteen bed rooms, billiard room (with full sized Alcock's table and fixtures), kitchen &c. The building, which is of weather board, is lathed and plastered throughout, and the front portion outside (six feet from the ground) is of jarrah-wood, oiled and polished, which has a pleasing effect."
There were stables at the rear, a septic system and acetylene gas lighting. The write-up also said it was a great centre for fishing, hunting and shooting.
Thomas O'Donohue bought Ellis out in 1907 and this was apparently a time of significant growth for Garfield In 1901 Garfield had 124 people. Ten years later it had 339 and in 1921 it had 567. These are the census figures and would not be entirely accurate even then, but to grow about 450 per cent on 20 years is pretty significant.
The picture theatre, legendary in many ways, was built by a Martin O'Donohue, very likely to have been a relative. That was in 1924, though, and the hotel had suffered a disaster before then.
On the night of April 22, 1914, a fierce blaze destroyed the hotel and Gabbett's General Store next to it. O'Donohue owned the hotel but T.J. Cryan was the licensee and lived on the premises. There were 26 people sleeping in the hotel but Cryan got them all awake and out safely. The licensee claimed to have lost twelve hundred pounds worth of stock and O-Donohue had the hotel only half insured, because of an insurance company policy that would cover only half the value of a weatherboard hotel.
There was much argument about what caused the fire and where it started – the store or the hotel. It was first seen by workers at Bird's bakery, who raised the alarm. The source did not really matter, though. The damage was done.
Gabbett, too, was only 'lightly' insured and he lost all stock and his building. He was able to move the business up to bakery, presumably on a much-reduced scale. The hotel reopened very quickly in a building on the other side to the general store.
O'Donohue and Cryan very quickly got on with the replacement of the Iona Hotel and it was apparently reopened in the new building early in 1915. In May of that year the shire health inspector approved the new facility, adding that it was one of the best-equipped hotels in the colony.
It was news to me that there were licence quotas for districts at the start of the last century and it was a surprise that Garfield was so late getting a hotel. Perhaps they were al temperate souls there…
After all, the railway came though in 1877. It was completed between Oakleigh and Sale in 1878 and linked to the suburban network in 1879. Railway construction gangs were not always known for their sobriety.
Mind you, Garfield itself was slow to get a school, too, and schools were the sign of established communities. The first 'Garfield' school was Cannibal Creek State School, out on the Gippsland Trk, now the Princes Highway.
This was in 1886. "During the 1890s the school site was changed to the top of the Garfield Hill, approximately halfway between the Princes Hwy and Garfield railway station." By now it was Garfield State School, with the new station and township area being named for assassinated US President J.A. Garfield.
The school moved into Garfield itself about 1914, so one could say that Garfield had a 'proper' hotel a decade before it had a school in the town. The picture theatre, another legend in the area and one with a brand-new lease of life was opened, I think, in 1924, and certainly somewhere close to that.
I started this with my confusion about why the Iona Hotel was in Garfield, but the name Cannibal Creek, Garfield's first name, is one on which there is some debate. It was almost certainly from "Connabul" and that might be a white-man-shortened version of Corhanwarrabul, a name used to the northwest.
The timber-mill siding opened in Garfield, or what would be Garfield, in 1877 was the Cannibal Creek Siding. The Post Office was initially Cannibal Creek P.O. You could put together a book on the Cannibal name.
Then, on 'the web' I found this quotation from 1903. "Mount View is a curious conical formation about 3 miles north of (the) township; it rises abruptly from the plain to a height of 600 feet, from which there are splendid views of Westernport (sic) Bay, the entrance to Port Phillip, &c." I cannot make "Mount View" fit into my knowledge of the area, unless it is a slightly inaccurate reference to Mount Cannibal (which never became Mount Garfield when the Cannibal name was dropped.
For regular readers I might add that I am still not certain of the exact location of the original level crossing. That is an itch that needs scratching.