 Of the four towns he established where Macquarie laid out a schoolhouse/chapel – Castlereagh, Pitt Town, Wilberforce and Richmond – only the Wilberforce example survives.The loss of elements of similar groups in other Macquarie towns or the loss of the inter-connectness of their parts means that the Macquarie Schoolhouse and St John's Church are arguably the purest expressions today of what Lachlan Macquarie sought to establish as key anchor points in his townscapes and in his programme of civilising convict society and ameliorating its less moral elements.His creation of these towns was an important expression of the developmental philosophy of settlement coupled with deliberate social engineering to control convict society and to implant a moral economy into their lifestyles.