The farm has been in the family since 1911; it’s now divided among descendants of the original Rowe owners, Agnes Hooper Mill (1874-1944) and William Philip Rowe (1876-1956). Their parents and grandparents, all immigrants from Illogan and St Agnes in Cornwall, were part of the Ranters Gully mining community in Campbells Creek, near Castlemaine, when the children were born. The “ranters” were Primitive Methodists, most or all of them from Cornwall and often related by blood or marriage or both.
However, in the late C19 many Cornish immigrants moved north and took up farms in the Mallee. The Rowes were among these settlers. William grew up in the Mallee, and eventually acquired a block in Willangie, near Woomelang, that his mother’s brother-in-law had received by ballot in November 1897.1
In 1904 he was farming there, but he returned to Campbells Creek to marry Aggie.2 Their first child was born in Campbells Creek in 1905 and the second in Willangie or Woomelang in 1908; a third son was born and baptised in Willangie in 1909. William was the director of the Willangie Methodist Sunday School when the boys were very young.
It must have been a hard life for people with generations of mining, not farming, behind them. Drought drove the Rowes off their farm in 1911, and they began afresh in Eden Park.
