Three Storey Mill

The four-storey mill at Mill Pond Farm is the most substantial building surviving from the gold rush era in the Jembaicumbene district. Charles Dransfield began construction in 1859, using bricks manufactured on the property and granite sourced directly from the farm. The massive interior beams were cut from hardwood in the nearby Budawang Ranges. The building was designed by C.E. Langley, a Sydney surveyor, and the engineering works, including the steam engine and milling equipment, were supplied by P.N. Russell and Co. of Sydney, one of the largest engineering establishments in colonial Australia. The mill opened in January 1860 under the name the Jembaicumbene Steam Flour Mills, serving a goldfield community of over 1,000 miners working Jembaicumbene Creek, among them approximately 600 Chinese miners. At its height the building housed flour milling, sawmilling, a quartz crushing battery, and a bakery across its four floors. Milling operations continued until 1885, when they ceased entirely. Charles Dransfield died on 19 January 1888. The steam engine and fittings were dismantled and sold at some point after closure. The building itself endured. From around 2008, Antony Davies and Andrew Gow undertook an eleven-year restoration of the mill and the broader property. The lower mill floors were returned to use as the Wheatfield Gallery, exhibiting fine art, craft, and decorative arts. Photographed in 2022, the mill stands in open grassland at Jembaicumbene, its brick upper walls rising above the stone ground floor, the iron roof steeply pitched and faded. A timber power pole stands in the foreground. Low hills and scattered trees fill the distance. The building's mass and materiality, locally made brick, farm-sourced granite, and Budawang hardwood, remain legible from outside. The site sits on Walbanga (Yuin) country, 10 kilometres south-west of Braidwood on the Southern Tablelands.