For the centenary of the Ben Lomond school in 1985 a committee of Tony Judge, Bill & Kate Every, Rose Coward, Sedge & Leonie Ormerod, and Patsy Fulloon compiled an excellent history of the area.
Earliest pioneers up there were Thomas Perry who took up Ben Lomond station and Andrew Wauchope – Moredun.
In the early 1880s a huge workforce of railway workers lived in tents along the route of the railway construction.
They toiled to lay lines, carve out cuttings and raise embankments with only basic equipment for this track from Armidale that was completed to Glen Innes in 1884 – a truly amazing feat!
What a determined group Ben Lomond residents accomplished later is equally astonishing.
An editorial in The Glen Innes Examiner June 1958 briefly stated:
“A three-mile section of mountainous road will stand as a monument to the energy of a band of local men who achieved the ‘impossible’ – the voluntary construction of a route which will allow their children to travel to school by bus.”
Behind this astonishing feat – Bill Every, Athol Cregan, Jim Coward, Hec Kemp, Allan Woodman, Harry Walker, Arthur Every, John Every, Merv McLeod – plus at the weekend – teachers Milton Trudgeon and Robert Unwin. [and no doubt others were involved]
These locals actually built three miles of road to join existing roads to enable a school bus to make the round trip from Ben Lomond and back again. Some further out parents then ran their children to the bus by car.
The route went through Every and Tarrant land and work included building culverts, making cuttings and suitable grades as there was a drop of 800 feet from the Maybole road down to Moredun Road, and forming a shallow stony crossing of Moredun creek.
The Guyra Shire Souncil lent a drag grader, a ‘flying flea’ grader, scoop and ripper and two gravel trucks at weekends.
Gravel was sourced from Alan Tarrant’s gravel pit on ‘Triangle’.
The money to cover the expense of building this road was contributed by the families concerned, and funds raised by holding functions such as a woolshed barbecue and dance at the Coward’s ‘Carinya’. We are told that ‘The school bus was christened in the dam on Moredun’.
Kevin Walsh owned and ran the bus for many years.
There must be many stories of those road building days?
