Discover Willow Vale

An inn, orchards and a railway platform

The Society’s history of the Prince Albert Inn explains the locality name. After buying the inn in 1860, Bartholomew Rush’s family operated it as the Willow Vale boarding house, named for notable trees in the area; Willow Vale became the name of the adjoining western village about 1882. This is a rare direct connection between a documented building, a family business and a present locality name.^[8]

Rush was known for orchard fruit and organised Rush’s Platform on the railway loop line to dispatch fruit to Sydney markets and assist guests. The 1891 Mittagong subdivision-plan list at the State Library of NSW includes a Rush Platform villa-orchard plan, providing a contemporary catalogue route for investigating the land and railway relationship. Later use of the inn as a boarding house, and its 1933 restoration as The Poplars, preserves further links between Willow Vale and the neighbouring Braemar landmark.^[8][9]

Family life and photographs

Willow Vale’s twentieth-century life included family weekends and recreation. Carolyn Dougherty recorded John Murray’s account of his grandmother Edith buying land at Orient and Badgery Streets in the early 1920s, and of his father Bertram building a small weekend cottage for their parents. Nearby, the Wilson property had a tennis court on Orient Street. A Society photograph shows Olive Murray on the cottage verandah at Christmas 1953.^[11][13][14]

A Willow Vale family donated more than fifty glass-plate negatives and late-nineteenth-century clothing to the Society. The associated account follows Florence Haydon, née Chant, and her family’s Mittagong connections.^[12]

Carolyn Dougherty’s Changing Fortunes: A History of Willow Vale brings together an illustrated local history of the village. The Society introduced the book in 2015; its research library catalogue lists a copy for consultation.^[10]