Henry Yelverton

Henry Yelverton (1821 – 1 April 1880) was an Australian sawmiller and timber merchant.

Yelverton was born in London, England; his father, Edward, was a jeweller. He went to the United States aged 18, having originally planned to study medicine, and was employed by a whaling ship that took him to Western Australia in 1845. He worked near Perth, employing sawyers by 1849. In 1853 he was a cooper and had bought a brig with a business partner to transport timber to the eastern colonies. He moved to the Vasse River area near Busselton in 1855. In 1858 he built a steam sawmill at Quindalup that provided timber from jarrah and tuart forests to the eastern colonies, British India, and Ceylon and employed up to 120 ex-convicts. He built a jetty, roads, bridges and a horse tramway for his forestry business, as well as Busselton's first courthouse. His company began the construction of Busselton Jetty in 1864 and 1865. He was also involved in the Castle Bay Whaling Company, was licensee of the Race Horse Inn at Fremantle, and smuggled tobacco for extra income. Customs officials heavily fined him for his tobacco-smuggling activities, but this did not affect his local standing; local consensus was that "he had done much more for the district than the government ever had".