Inspection records of the school begin in 1859 and Sophia Tuck resigned from teaching by 1885.   Amy ‘Harriet’ Tuck is registered also as a teacher being appointed as a sewing mistress at Mt Torrens from 1876 to 1887.  Lillecrapp records refer to Harriet running a ‘Ladies School’ at Kenton Valley, so perhaps she taught domestic skills to the older girls.

It’s not sure where Charles and Francis Lillecrapp went to school, since the Kenton Valley School is registered as being a female school.  However, the older five Lillecrapp children attended school in Tungkillo. This meant they would board with friends during the week and walk all the way home to Kenton Valley for weekends.   

William Lillecrapp was active in the community and was a founding member of the Salem Baptist Church at Gumeracha.  He was also appointed a Justice of the Peace where he was to help keep the pace by hearing and determining charges for locals who had committed petty offences.  His wife, Jane, died on 7th July 1870 when their youngest child was just 14. She was buried at the Salem Baptist Church at Gumeracha. William remarried two years later to widow, Jane Hooper (better known as Jeanie).  Jeanie had two unmarried adult sons, John and Henry, who went on to marry William and Jane’s two youngest daughters, Elizabeth (Bessie)—in 1875 and Emily—in 1877, respectively. Several years after his retirement, William died of a stroke in 1881 and was buried at the Salem Baptist Church at Gumeracha next to his first wife, Jane. Jeanie survived her second husband by nearly 30 years.  She died in 1910 and is buried at the Payneham Cemetery next to her son, Henry Hooper.

It was after William and Jeanie’s retirement to Kent Town in about 1880, that William’s eighth child, Elizabeth, along with her husband of five years, John Hooper, took over farming at ‘Netherhill’.  They owned the property for nearly 20 years. They had a family of eight children in the ‘Netherhill’ house—five daughters and three sons (Mary 1876, Bessie 1878, Isabella 1880, John 1882, Alice 1883, Charles 1884 and twins Andrew and Margaret 1885).  To accommodate their growing family, the Hooper family built on to the house sometime during the 1880s. The new extension included a large hallway and a new front entry door (originally, the back door of the house came off the new hallway), a pantry, a new kitchen (with whitewash over the stonework, the same as the Old Dairy), a new backdoor and a large sitting room both with two new fireplaces with chimneys.  The original kitchen then became the dining room for subsequent families. There was once a servery between the kitchen and the sitting room. The new fireplace was a tall structure and the new kitchen fireplace was very low being about four feet from the ground. It is suggested the original cellar became defunct at this time, as a new building (known by later families as the ‘Old Dairy’ and more recently the ‘Creamery’) was built behind the house into the side of an embankment.  This was a common practice at the time. The building was constructed with stone walls half a metre thick for insulation. The dairy was used to store foods in cooler temperatures, such as home-grown ham, bacon and sausages, and to store milk in pans where they would collect the cream. Later, there was a big tree trunk about two feet in diameter installed in the Old Dairy that had a separator bolted to it. The Old Dairy had two doors. One was wide with a door made of wooden slats.  There was a second narrow door that was already bricked in by 1974. It is now known they there were two doors side-by-side, but perhaps the wider door was to accommodate the women with their large hooped skirts. There is a small window in the Old Dairy. When the rotting window frame was replaced in the 1990s by local builder, Bronte Kerber, it was discovered the frame was made of timber from old apple packing boxes stamped for export to England. The stencils were still hanging in the Old Dairy in 1974.

Lillecrapp records have Elizabeth and John Hooper moving to Queen Street in Norwood in 1890, where the children were well educated.  Some of the older children had earlier attended the Tuck’s Kenton Valley School. After moving to Norwood, some of the younger girls attended the Brown’s School (now known as Wilderness College) and Miss Derrington’s School at Magill.  Several of the younger boys attended Prince Alfred College.

John started a partnership with his brother, Henry, operating a successful general store and bakery at High Street, Kensington, known as ‘J. Hooper and Company’.    Of the eight Hooper children, two daughters became nurses, one become a teacher, one son joined the family business working in the general store and bakery and one become a mining engineer.  Only two followed the family tradition and ventured into agriculture. Alice Hooper married a fruit grower named William Ind and they had a property at Paradise they named ‘Netherhill’, assumedly after Alice’s fondness for her childhood family home at Kenton Valley.  They later continued fruit growing in Paradise across the Torrens Creek at an Ind family property called ‘Balmoral’. Elizabeth and John’s youngest son and twin, Andrew, first worked as a wool classer and then later become a grazier at Myponga.

It is unknown exactly who farmed ‘Netherhill’ between John and Elizabeth’s move to Norwood in 1890 and the eventual sale of the property in 1898 to neighbour, John Sandercock.  In the book ‘Dust Storms in China Tea Cups—The Ragless Family Heritage to Australia’, it is mentioned that Richard Spotswood leased five sections of land totalling 312 acres in the Hundred of Talunga for five years between 1894 and 1898.  It goes on to say the owner, John Hooper, a storeman from Kensingston, decided to sell the property in mid-1898 to John Sandercock, a farmer of Kenton Valley, adding it to his property which had been occupied by the Sandercock family since the 1830s (1988, p.136).  This interesting twist links the history of ‘Netherhill’ to Margaret Reid once again, as Richard Spotswood’s mother was Sophia Ragless, sister to Benjamin Ragless (Margaret’s great grandfather).