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Walhalla in its heyday 1880-1900
The strongest expression of Walhalla's "glory days" is found in mining statistics of dividends paid and shafts sunk, and gold that was returned for amounts of quartz that were crushed, and the figures are undoubtedly impressive. The richest mines, for example, returned over a million pounds in dividends to their investors, or more than £500 per £5 share, in the course of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. At its deepest, the Long Tunnel Extended Gold Mine's main shaft descended for almost a kilometer. The infrastructure that the mining industry required brought collateral progress to the township as well. In 1884, Walhalla briefly led the world in having its own public electricity supply providing illumination for the main junction of the town, although possibly not for the most civic-minded of reasons. Walhalla's second-biggest industry was timber for the mines, both for their construction and as fuel for the furnaces, and one of the most distinctive features of photographs that were taken of early Walhalla is how quickly the surrounding hills were stripped bare of their massive, centuries-old timber. Even compared to the way it looks barely a century later, which is a relatively short time in the life of tall timber, the area looked quite uncommonly barren. This meant that increasingly lengthy timber tramways were required to bring in timber that was being sought and felled at increasingly greater distances from the mines. In 1899, for instance, the Long Tunnel Mine alone used over 19,000 tonnes of firewood and a further 1100 tonnes of mine timbers. Indeed, Walhalla's eventual decline as an economically viable mining centre was in no small part attributable to the shortage of nearby reserves of fuel.
Daily milk deliveries before school, 1904 (note the bare hills). |
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Life in Walhalla went on against the backdrop of the mines, and the incessant hammering of the stamper batteries crushing gold-bearing quartz 24 hours a day. It was said that residents had trouble sleeping on Sundays, when the batteries would fall silent. |
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© 2004 Walhalla Heritage & Development League Inc. |
