Municipal Status, Town Hall and Civic Centre
Ballarat East was one of the first areas of Ballarat to gain municipal status. In 1859 the newly formed Ballarat East Town Council acquisioned land in what was to become the Barkly Street civic area and in 1861 Dec 26 the foundation stone was laid for the Ballarat East Town Hall which was built in a Renaissance Revival architecture style and set in formal gardens. It was completed the following year along with the Ballarat East Free Library next door and the Ballarat fire station, a new headquarters for the fire brigade formed in 1856) was erected a few years later in 1864.
Ballarat East had its own railway station in the 1860s (only the goods sheds remain), built shortly after Ballarat West's station. It became an important junction for branch lines before being closed in the 1960s and its platforms demolished.
The East Ballarat Town Council was amalgamated with Ballarat West Town Council in 1920-1921 to become the City of Ballarat. After this time there was indecision as to how to use the old hall. In 1927 the Ballarat Teachers College moved there however during the great depression the town hall was mostly unused and was finally demolished in 1936 after years of speculation of its use as a girls school or headquarters for the Ballarat Historical Society. The gates to the Town Hall's once extensive gardens remain.
Read more about this topic: Ballarat East, Victoria, History
Famous quotes containing the words municipal, town, hall, civic and/or centre:
“No sane local official who has hung up an empty stocking over the municipal fireplace, is going to shoot Santa Claus just before a hard Christmas.”
—Alfred E. Smith (1873–1944)
“A little instruction in the elements of chartography—a little practice in the use of the compass and the spirit level, a topographical map of the town common, an excursion with a road map—would have given me a fat round earth in place of my paper ghost.”
—Mary Antin (1881–1949)
“Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.”
—Donald Hall (b. 1928)
“It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.”
—Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969)
“Belief and love,—a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)