William ("Bill") Smith
After prospector and packer William ("Bill") Smith discovered a track from the Hodgkinson goldfield to the coast in 1876, the township that developed on the banks of the Barron River took his name. Officially, it was Smithfield, but as far as the packers and teamsters who worked out of the settlement were concerned, it was Smithville. Smithfield, in England, was a notorious location where witches and martyrs were burned at the stake. North Queensland's Smithfield gained notoriety as a lawless frontier town before Smith, who operated the Pioneer Hotel on Macdonald Street with his wife Mary, found himself heavily in debt and unable to settle his accounts.
A well-attended race meeting on Boxing Day 1877 produced "perhaps the most extraordinary and terrible event in the annals of Australian crime” (Brisbane Courier, 7 January 1878) after Smith's booth at the races ran out of liquor berfore midday. When he asked storekeeper Robert Craig to supply him with more stock, Craig refused until the outstanding account was settled. Smith left his wife in charge of the booth around noon, returned home and two-and-a-half hours later, entered Craig’s store with a request to come to his hotel so Smith could “settle with him”. The murder/suicide that followed entrenched the short-lived settlement's notoriety. Like nearby Cairns, competition from Port Douglas had left Smithfield practically deserted when the Barron River's flood swept the remaining buildings out to sea in 1879.
