Brick Mill

The mill at Mill Pond Farm is a four-storey structure of locally manufactured brick and farm-sourced granite, its walls rising from a stone ground floor through three further levels of multi-paned windows to a gabled roof now mottled with rust. A central loading door at the upper storey opens onto a small iron balcony, the kind of practical feature that tells you the building was designed to move bulk goods between floors, not to impress anyone. The surrounding grassland is open and flat, and under a heavy grey sky the mill reads as the only vertical thing for a considerable distance. Charles Dransfield began construction in 1859, using brick fired on the property and granite drawn from the farm itself. The heavy interior beams were cut from timber in the Budawang Ranges. The building was designed by C.E. Langley, a Sydney surveyor, and the steam engine and milling equipment were manufactured and supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, one of the largest engineering works in colonial Australia. The mill opened in January 1860 under the name the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills. The timing was deliberate. By 1859, more than 1,000 miners were working Jembaicumbene Creek, approximately 600 of them Chinese. Dransfield, who had made money growing wheat and selling gold leases through the 1850s, built the mill to feed that settlement. The building also housed a sawmill, a quartz crushing battery for gold extraction, and a bakery. All milling operations ceased in 1885. The mill is described as the most substantial building to survive from the gold rush era in the Jembaicumbene district. When photographed in 2022, it stood much as it had for more than 160 years: brick and granite on open Southern Tablelands country, the loading door still centred in the upper storey, the windows still ranked in rows across the face of the building.