Скачать или смотреть Alexandra and Clyde in Central Otado are historic gold mining towns near Queenstown rich in heritage

The town was founded during the Otago gold rush in the 1860s, and was named after Alexandra of Denmark by John Aitken Connell who surveyed the town. In a two-month period in 1862, two gold miners called Horatio Hartley and Christopher Reilly collected 34 kilograms of gold from the Cromwell Gorge, Hartley and Reilly travelled together to New Zealand after meeting in the Californian gold rush. They initially worked in secret to obtain as much gold as they could along the Cromwell gorge. In order to obtain the government's reward on offer for gold discoveries, they made the site public. By 1889, most of the easy to access gold had been mined and leases were sold for virtually nothing. At this stage, stone fruit orchards gradually took over the local economy. When the river had run out of gold, the riverbanks were dredged. This was termed ‘paddock dredging’. This continued day and night between 1896 and 1924 and again between 1951 and 1963. The noise was ever present and loud, and it also produced significant quantities of dust which plagued Alexandra. If the dredging hit hard rock, it interrupted the power supply to Alexandra and the lights of the entire town dimmed. The tailings from all the dredging now cover 170 hectares in a historic reserve known as the Earnscleugh Dredge Tailings. In 1878, the Clutha River flooded many towns including Clyde and Alexandra. The Manuherikia valley "resembled an inland sea". As a result of this event, the Alexandra suspension bridge was constructed between 1879 and 1882 after the bridge at Clyde failed in the 1878 flood. The Otago Central Railway line from Dunedin into Central Otago reached Alexandra in December 1906. Originally referred to as "Alexandra South" to distinguish it from a North Island town with the same name, the word "South" was dropped in 1867 after the North Island town was renamed to Pirongia. Many orchards were destroyed in the 1980s as a result of construction, 10 km upriver, of the Clyde High Dam, which is the country's third largest hydroelectric power station.