Frequent mention of the goldfields at Minnow River was made in our recent articles about Beulah. For this current series on the History of Mining in Kentish, let us take a closer look at who was involved in the formation and demise of Beulah’s fabled Star of the West Mine.

Three years after JG (One-Arm Jack) Johnson and his party of five made known their initial discovery of alluvial gold in the Minnow River in Dec 1877, the Star of the West Gold Mining Co (Mt Roland) was formed on 17 Dec 1880. Twenty-seven shareholders put up £10,000 to develop the promising mine site. Nine people committed £650, three £500, seven £250 and the rest £125. The leading shareholders from Sheffield were Thomas Lewis Johnson, JG (Jack) Johnson, George Johnson, John Greenhill, Malcolm Campbell and George Strawberry (all committed to investing £650). From Latrobe: Joseph Lobley, George Atkinson and Samuel Wright. Deloraine: Wm Field (Calstock), Wm Burt (Deloraine Hotel), Robert Horne (Bowerbank), J Caleb Smith (Keanefield), Alfred Peart and John Fitzgerald. Launceston: Wm Aikenhead, Wm Ritchie, Jos Powell, Chas De Little, John Bartley, Arthur Harrison, Edwin Elms, Peter Barrett, Campbell Sleigh, Alex Heslop and Edmund Higgins. The legal manager was Andrew Reid at his registered office in Brisbane St, Launceston. Directors appointed were Wm Ritchie, Wm Aikenhead, John Powell, Peter Barrett, A J Harrison (Launceston), Rob Horne, J Caleb Smith, (Deloraine) and John Greenhill (Sheffield).

To get to the place of forming a company was not an easy journey and was fraught with difficulties. Initially, a mini gold rush brought over a hundred hopefuls who scoured along the Minnow River for nearly two miles, hoping to pick up small gold nuggets. When this didn’t occur, within a week most fortune hunters returned home, their hopes dashed. The more serious prospectors, like the Johnson family and other groups, continued searching. To make it easier, they lit bushfires to burn the thick scrub. Pan-washing in the river did produce many encouraging gold specks, but to become a payable venture, the primary reef of gold needed to be found. They dug test holes 10–15ft deep, but the quartz stone was particularly hard.

Selecting the site for their Mining Lease

Gradually, most prospectors traced the alluvial gold specks back up the Minnow River and its tributaries, but the reef proved to be quite elusive. One young miner, a 16-year-old youth from Launceston, took seriously ill and died of diphtheria in Jack Johnson’s house in Sheffield. Eventually, in June 1880, as they worked the higher ground of a spur on the western end of Gog Range, the gold specks became coarser in very promising auriferous quartz. Encouraged by the increasing size of the gold specimens, they felt confident enough to choose this location for their 10-acre mining lease.

On 20 Aug 1880, the first two 10-acre mining leases were selected, both by Sheffield parties. The first lease registered was JG (Jack) Johnson and family members and adjoining them on the west side was Stephen Smith’s group, consisting of John & Frank Greenhill, Malcolm Campbell, George Strawberry and Sam Wright. Within a few months, 24 other leases had been registered, most in the same general area at the far end of Gog Range.

Johnson’s party chose Anthony Nodin as their mining manager, who, over the next months, blasted an open cut 171ft long and sunk five shafts to a depth of about 50ft. He passed through porphyry, quartz and several gold-bearing veins. Nodin believed they had discovered two different reefs. He forwarded five tons of the stone to Beaconsfield for a trial crushing at Ellis’s battery. The tests showed excellent prospects of gold, putting the miners into a high state of gold fever. Some threw pound notes up into the air. JG (Jack) Johnson decided to sell his new general store and his farm in Sheffield to concentrate on these promising mining prospects.

Forming the Star of the West Mining Co

Of course, they realised the ground was so hard that nothing could be done without crushing machinery, and this involved a capital outlay greater than most groups could afford. For this reason, the first two mining lease parties, the Johnsons and the Smiths, combined their adjoining 10-acre blocks, and on 17 Dec 1880 formed the Star of the West Mining Co (Mt Roland). As there were several other registered Star of the West mines, their mine was always identified by adding Mt Roland. Though the mine is gone today, this most westerly hill on Gog Range remains officially named Star of the West hill.

The mining manager chose a processing site nearby, erected several miners’ huts and built a blacksmith shop. But just as they were about to spend big money on mining machinery, major new discoveries of gold, silver-lead and tin were announced at Round Hill near Mt Claude. Prospectors were claiming it would become a second Mt Bischoff. The Mt Claude Silver-lead Mining Co was formed, and the government promised to clear a proper road to Mt Claude. These sensational developments resulted in another rush of prospectors to this latest field, including several leaseholders from Minnow River like Robert Manley, Walter Butler, John Strawberry and others. They were discouraged; they had worked hard and found nothing.

This put the shareholders of Star of the West mine in a quandary. They became unsure whether to invest big money at Mt Gog or Mt Claude. They dilly-dallied for six months until complaints began to surface about the apathy of the Star of the West Company. One newspaper reported: ‘News from the Minnow has been rather dull lately through the unaccountable apathy of the Star of the West Co.’ In July 1881, JG (Jack) Johnson became so discouraged, he also ‘jumped ship’. He quit his Star of the West Co, moved to Mt Claude, where he and others staked a large prospecting claim, which they worked for several years.

This is the point some Kentish old-timers believed the Star of the West mine must have been ‘salted’, although it was never proved, unlike at Beaconsfield and Lefroy where highly publicised court cases resulted in hefty fines. ‘Salting’ means someone stuffing specks of gold into a 12-shot cartridge, then firing them into the rock face or tunnel where assessors find them and recommend to the shareholders to go ahead and spend their money. Someone wrote: ‘If any investor saw the gold that is visible on the Star of the West property, they would not let it stand still for one hour, let alone six months.’ This spurred Star of the West shareholders into action, though they were forced to reorganise their company. They did this on 29 Sept 1881 when Anthony Nodin left and Wm Creelman became the new mine manager. After a detailed examination of the site, Creelman strongly recommended the purchase of mining machinery.

The Development of the Mine

There were two parts to the development of the Star of the West operation. There was the mining site up on the side of the hill where they retrieved mineral ore and the processing plant down on the river flats some 350 yards away. Connecting these two operational sites, two sets of wooden tramway tracks were laid so that the full ore trucks coming down the hill pulled the returning empty trucks back up into the tunnel entrance.

Up at the Mining Site: First they sank a shaft 70ft deep and securely timbered it to act as an air shaft to the tunnel they were planning to drive into the centre of the claim. In doing so, they found another lot of gold-bearing stone about the centre of the lease. It was like that in the five other shafts previously put down. It was proposed to run a tunnel into the hill to cut these reefs, which were known to exist running east to west in the claim. A hopper was erected over the face of the tunnel to pass the ore down into the trucks.

Down at the Processing Plant: Wm Creelman also built a race 63 chains (1.3kms) in length to bring water from the Minnow River to the processing plant for washing the gold. A stationary steam engine loaned by shareholder J Caleb Smith of Deloraine came by bullock wagon via Latrobe and took a week to get to the Minnow mill. There the engine was bolted down, ready to power the ten-head battery crusher purchased from Salisbury & Co, Launceston, at a cost of £350. This crushing machine was sent by the SS Albion to the Latrobe wharf, carried by tramway to Railton station and hauled by a team of oxen to the processing mill. It had ten massive stampers that reduced quartz rock almost to gravel. A suitable machinery shed was erected over it. From the stamper-boxes, the crushed quartz got ‘washed’ down through long sloping sluice boxes, or through the puddling machines that removed gold from clay, or the ripple-board tables that had ripples cut in them every couple of feet to separate gold from the ore, or the blanket table that could catch the finest gold specks.

At last, on 5 Sep 1882 came the long-awaited news: ‘We are in business, working as fast as possible, with three shifts of men each day. The hopper is full, and last Wednesday we started the battery crusher.’ Two weeks later: ‘Since starting, 447 trucks of dirt [ore] have passed through the battery crusher. I shall soon be able to dispense with the night shift, as the day shift will be sufficient to obtain the amount of crushed dirt necessary to keep the battery going. The shutes work very well; in fact, I filled a truck in half a minute. The trucks run well on wooden rails and tip easily, but when the rails are plaited with iron strips, they will run even better.’

Two more calls (the eighth and ninth) of one shilling a share were made upon all the shareholders due for payment on 14 Oct and 15 Nov 1882. Late in October, a good many shareholders visited the claim expecting to see something grand like small specimens of gold nuggets. But at the Minnow goldfields, they discovered the Star of the West mine was the only claim still at work. Five hundred tons of ore had been crushed, and the shareholders were staggered to learn that the results were terribly poor – the crushings only producing about three grains to the ton.

Shocked, the shareholders called a special meeting to decide whether they should continue or suspend operations at the mine. Mr Creelman stated that the alluvial wash had not come up to expectations, but to achieve the mine’s true potential, a tunnel should be cut through the claim to the southern boundary of the lease. He was convinced that a reef did exist in the hill. This was done, and when they finally broke through into the old diggings, the results were devastating. The gold specks had petered out, and no gold reef was found. For a few weeks they fossicked about in other diggings and shafts trying to pick up any veins that might lead to the gold reef, but by the end of Oct 1882 the mine was forced to close, and all hands were laid off. In Dec 1882, to pay expenses, the mining secretary made another  call on the shareholders’ money, threatening that if not paid by the 14th, legal proceedings would be taken against the defaulting shareholders. In Mar 1883, a mining meeting of the Star of the West was announced for Mr A Young’s office in Launceston but lapsed for the want of a quorum. Two months later, the machinery was sold to the Premier Gold Mining Co opening south of Scottsdale. To finalise all debts, in June 1883, a final call of ninepence per share was made to all shareholders. Then on 1 Dec 1883, the Star of the West forfeited its mining lease, and the company was wound up.

Old Mine Reworked

Late in 1886, Henry Weeks, Thomas Dawson and other prospectors went back to the Minnow to inspect the deserted Star of the West mine. They found a battery shed, a water race, 12 good huts and a considerable amount of tunnelling. The result of this inspection was the formation of another company to reopen this mine. It comprised Henry Weeks, Joseph Lobley and P Rizzo (sleeping shareholders) and AW Cherry, T Shepheard, T Johnstone and Tom Dawson (working shareholders). Tom Dawson was mine manager, and Joseph Lobley was secretary. They extended one of the old tunnels by 380 ft to 585 ft. An attempt was made to work two shifts, so more miners were brought in, but once again, lack of finance became the problem. The miners were not in the mood to put up with irregular payments, so again the mine fizzled out.

Over the following decades, several mining companies and individuals returned to the Star of the West mine attempting to make it pay, but each time they have left the tunnels and shafts with very little encouragement. One yarn had it that the little locomotive that pulled the ore trucks was supposed to have been driven into a tunnel before they blew up the entrance. What is true, however, is that over the years the old shafts have been used to dump dead animals. At one time when several horses around Beulah got a disease and died, they were gathered up and thrown down an old mine shaft, which became known locally as the Dead Horse Mine.