History
In the 1850s, Whitehorse Road was built to be the primary route from Melbourne to Gippsland, a rather circuitous route which went via the Dandenong Ranges. The primary route to Gippsland from the CBD is now through Monash Freeway and the South Gippsland Highway.
The road, when first built, was named Three Chain Road, due to the road width being 66 yards (60 m) wide.
The traffic led to the establishment of a hotel in Box Hill named the White Horse hotel which had been named in respect to a horse belonging to Capt Elgar, a property owner in the area. It is this hotel of which the road obtained its name. However, the hotel was forced to shut its doors in 1921 when Box Hill became a dry area. A replica of the white horse from the roof of the hotel now stands in the median strip of Whitehorse Road, while the restored original is located in the Box Hill town hall.
Read more about this topic: Maroondah Highway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)