History Notes - wrap up for 2025

History Notes

The last Notes for 2025 – how quickly the year has gone.

First of all, apologies for failing to put ‘PTO” on last weeks notes and we missed the section on former residents and their comments. Other names, apart from the Sofis girls who we knew so well including Christine, Sue Hancock, Libby White and cousin, Peter Witten. How much Barraba has changed over the years!

This year has been very busy with more visitors and lots of enquiries. We managed to overcrowd the Museum with the Smith Family reunion in November. Hope they enjoyed their visit as much as our members did.

Two days later we had a Senior Citizens lunch which was also enjoyed by everyone who attended.

During the year we have managed some renovations to give more area for display and provide more cement paths for our senior citizens safety. Unfortunately, we are still waiting for safety rails but no doubt they will come before too long.

Hopefully the Horton Valley file will be completed over the next couple of months – several families have proved to be a bit hard to trace but time for research has been the main problem.

There is a lot of history in E.L. Bates memoirs as well as the book published by the Bingara Historical Society to read. Mr Bates virtually grew up in the Valley and wrote about a lot of different people as well as the animals and birds he saw. He was five when he settled in the Valley with his mother and stepfather and grown-up when he moved away. Some of his family were in Bingara but he gradually moved down the Hunter Valley, living at Eccleston near Paterson for quite a while, later moving further down towards Newcastle. Les Bates described an over-loaded truck in one of his letters –

“One morning, I think it was 1923/4 a lorry came past Kingsland. They pulled up for a while, to get some water, it was one of Roly Hungerford’s, a little yellow/brown Federal, built to carry three and a half tons. It was on its way to Rocky Creek crossing and between cement, timber, iron, wheelbarrows, picks and shovels and all sorts of working gear, plus seven men and their camping and cooking gear, plus a week’s tucker and spare clothes!!”

It was probably carrying 7 ½ tons. How did they climb Bells Mountain and how did they get safely down the mountain to Upper Horton village?