GOLD
(www.northeastvictoria.online)
Pastoralist David Reid (1820-1906) was the son of Surgeon-Lieutenant David Reid, a veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar, and in 1845, when excavating the water-race for a flour mill near Yackandandah, discovered gold.
Word soon got around, and the great Victorian gold rush was on in earnest, with prospectors swarming throughout the North-east and panning almost every stream for gold.
Reid and his family were amongst the early settlers of the area, and came to the North-east in the 1820s, taking up land in the Wangaratta, Beechworth, Stanley and Yackandandah areas. They were therefore sitting unknowingly on some of the great gold fields of the North-east.
One of the first confirmed discoveries in the Beechworth area was at Spring Creek, just upstream of the Newtown Bridge, followed by other discoveries all very close to Beechworth, or May Day Hills as the district was then known.
Gold was discovered in the Buckland Valley in 1853, and this lead to an influx of about 6 000 hopeful miners.
Typical of many mining communities, there was a wide mix of ethnicity on the goldfields, and racial tensions boiled over on July 4, 1857, when the Buckland Riot erupted, largely targeting Chinese people who had moved in on the areas regarded as ’worked out’ by other diggers.
The Chinese left many reminders of their presence throughout the North-east, including tombstones and the ’Burning Towers’ at Beechworth, as well as tombstones in and around Omeo.
Very soon there was an urgent need for the establishment of a town in the goldfields areas, and (for example) in 1853 a survey for a town site at the present site of Beechworth was completed.
Inevitably the newest and grandest buildings of the new township of Beechworth were the hotels.
One of the first was the Star Hotel (Ford Street) constructed in 1852, closely followed by Tanswells Commercial Hotel (Ford Street).
By the mid-1870s there were more than 60 hotels in town, all doing a roaring trade, and later in the same decade a brewery was established in the town.
These were boom times, and the scenario at Beechworth was repeated at almost every town in the North-east.
Intro Screen on a fresh browser page
COPYRIGHT © 1995-2020, Chris McLaughlin.