Historic Walk

During Room 9s Historic Walk around Arrowtown we discovered how things have changed over time.



In 1867 A girl named Mary Cotter wanted to help the miners plant trees She kept asking “Can I help?” But the same answer was always no, Mary. Finally one miner said “If you skip around this tree three times we will name this tree after you.” So now the tree stands proud and tall with a bit of a fork in. It is when you skip around the tree three times that you get good luck.



While we were on our Historic walk we stopped outside some old English miner’s houses. One belonged to the mayor of old Cromwell town, and to this house there is a story. It goes like this, when Cromwell was first built they had a mayor. The mayor was good at lots of things and lived with his wife and twelve kids. One day his wife complained that the house was too small and told him to build an extension on the house but the only thing that the mayor wasn’t good at was building. However the mayor was smart so he brought the house next door and got it dragged and added it to his house with a nice balcony to keep his wife happy.



The next stop was the old Church there is another story to be told there, that the priest that heard about Mary McKillop who was a nun, and the priest managed to convince her to come to Cromwell, and set up a Catholic school beside the church. Soon after that she started to run the school, a few years later after the Gold Rush people started moving out of Cromwell so the school closed down. The nuns went to another place where they needed a Catholic school. The priest thought what’s going to happen to the school I know it could be my garage. So that’s what he did, when the priest died the people of Cromwell thought that the church didn’t look good enough to be God’s house. They thought bricks where the kind of thing the house of God should be made out of but then bricks were to expensive so they put a special covering over it, and painted lines on it to make it look like bricks.
Next we went to the Arrowtown Gaol. Before there was a Goal (gaol which was the English word for jail) there was a log and they used to chain people to it, but one day a lady and a man had a fight on the log and started swearing at each other. This was a real problem because some people had ever heard such terrible words before. Another problem was that the log rotted and the people escaped so the police decided to build a Gaol so people could not stay escape. When they built it, they had four rooms. Two at the front, two at the back, the two at the front had metal doors and they were very, very dark but the two at the back had thinner doors a window and a fire place. The two at the front were for men and the two at the back were for women. There was only one person who escaped from that Gaol but he got caught in Dunedin.




The last stop was the Chinese Village. At the Chinese Village there was a special house that belonged to a man who’s house was like a hotel/shop or a house people could stay in the spare room and in the loft. The man was very smart and had his bedroom beside the shop so robbers couldn’t rob his gold.



There was a vegetable garden further down. There was a man called old Tom he owned that vegetable garden on the side of the hill, the reason for the garden to be on a hill was so that no one could stand on them and Old Tom sold beautiful vegetables every day. It also meant when the river flooded the vegetables wouldn’t be ruined. One day he died from a tragic heart attack and landed in his fireplace but the fireplace was not lit.



That was the end of the historic walk I hope you learnt a lot.

by Jennifer, Olivia, Bronte and Erica.