Casino

In the late 1830s Henry Clay and George Stapleton took up land along the Richmond River. Stapleton had cut a path down to the coast from Glen Innes and, with Clay, he purchased cattle. They laid claim to 30,000 acres in the Richmond Valley and named their property ‘Cassino’ after the historic hillside town of Monte Cassino in Italy. Later the property was transferred to Mr. Clarke Irving.

By 1842 cedar cutters were in the lower reaches of the Richmond Valley near Pelican Creek. Over the next decade the whole of the valley was settled and by 1849 there were more than 20 squatters and a significant number of cedar-cutters who were shipping their timber to Sydney.

The first evidence of a settlement occurred at a place known as ‘The Falls’ in the early 1850s. It is known that Petty Sessions were being held in the valley as early as 1847 and that a postmaster was employed in early 1849. By 1853 Assistant Surveyor W. Darke had surveyed a site for a village and that same year both a General Store and a Hotel – the Durham Ox Inn – were built in what is now Richmond Street. Later that year a policeman arrived in ‘The Falls’ and the following year a bark hut was built which became the Court House.

In 1855 the Surveyor General, Sir Thomas Mitchell, declared the need for a town in the valley with suburban allotments and a proper subdivision. Licensed Surveyor Peppercorne submitted a plan of a “site for a town of Casino” and hence-forth the name became Casino.

By 1857 a private school had been opened on the bank of the Richmond River catering for 15 students. A doctor arrived two years later and in the same year a second hotel, Tattersalls, was opened. In 1861 the town saw the opening of the first Public School and the population had grown to a point where there was a mail delivery once a week. Still this was hardly a thriving country town. Robert Dawson, who arrived in the area in 1870, described it as ‘a drab little village though there were some buildings of fair pretensions’ and observed that ‘roads were almost non-existent, only rough bush tracks being available’ and that ‘nowhere on the Richmond were there any banks, churches, newspapers or telegraph lines’.

The next few years were to see this rather sad village turned into a town. In June 1870 the Commercial Banking Company of Sydney established a local branch. By December of that year the ‘Richmond River Express and Tweed Advertiser’ was being published and in 1871 a Police Magistrate and Telegraph Office arrived. In 1876, after years of construction, a bridge across the Richmond River was completed.

Between the 1870s and the 1890s the town competed for importance with Lismore and by the 1890s Lismore was clearly the more important of the town centres. By 1905 the railway had arrived but the town had already positioned itself as a service centre for the surrounding rich agricultural lands.


River Towns