charleville

Baker's Lane/Road.......It's unrecognizable today. The only building I can see that still exists is that two story house with the three windows over a window.(dispensary on Osi ) Street view OSI (1903)

Here is a 1907 Guy's, it lists 3 dairies in Charleville, none of them called Meadowvale.

It's also marked as the 'Maypole Dairy' on the 1903 map.

Further down that page, we see Butter Exporters including Maypole Dairy Company, the name for this building on the OSI 25"

Meadowvale is in the 1910 Guys!

John Palmer, a theatre owner from Bath, believed that the coach service he had previously run for transporting actors and materials between theatres could be used for a countrywide mail delivery service, so in 1782, he suggested to the Post Office in London that they take up the idea. He met resistance from officials who believed that the existing system could not be improved, but eventually the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Pitt, allowed him to carry out an experimental run between Bristol and London. Under the old system, the journey had taken up to 38 hours. The coach, funded by Palmer, left Bristol at 4 pm on 2 August 1784 and arrived in London just 16 hours later. Impressed by the trial run, Pitt authorised the creation of new routes. By the end of 1785, there were services from London to Norwich, Liverpool, Leeds, Dover, Portsmouth, Poole, Exeter, Gloucester, Worcester, Holyhead and Carlisle. A service to Edinburgh was added the next year and Palmer was rewarded by being made Surveyor and Comptroller General of the Post Office. Australia's first mail coach was established in 1828 and was crucial in connecting the remote settlements being established to the larger centers. The first mail contracts were issued and mail was transported by coach or on horseback from Sydney to the first seven country post offices – Penrith, Parramatta, Liverpool, Windsor, Campbelltown, Newcastle, and Bathurst. In 1863 contracts were awarded to the coaching company Cobb & Co to transport Royal Mail services within New South Wales and Victoria. These contracts and later others in Queensland continued until 1924 when the last service operated in western Queensland. The lucrative mail contracts helped Cobb & Co grow and become an efficient and vast network of coach services in eastern Australia. In Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia, a mail coach was a stagecoach built to a General Post Office-approved design operated by an independent contractor to carry long-distance mail for the Post Office. Mail was held in a box at the rear where the only Royal Mail employee, an armed guard, stood. Passengers were taken at a premium fare. There was seating for four passengers inside and more outside with the driver. The guard's seat could not be shared. This distribution system began in Britain in 1784. In Ireland, the same service began in 1789, and in Australia, it began in 1828. Royal Mail coach services reached their peak in the later decades of the 19th century, operating over thousands of miles of eastern Australia. In the 1870s Cobb & Co's Royal Mail coaches were operating some 6000 horses per day and travelling 28,000 miles weekly carrying mail, gold, and general parcels. Some Concord stagecoaches were imported from the United States and made in New Hampshire by the Abbot-Downing Company. This design was a 'thorough-brace' or 'jack' style coach characterized by an elegant curved lightweight body suspended on two large leather straps, which helped to isolate the passengers and driver from the jolts and bumps of the rough unmade country roads. Soon Australian coach builders using many of the Concord design features customised the design for Australian conditions. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_coach

Out here they call it Poppa’s Place or Harry’s place. Its official name, however, is the Hotel Corones. It is named after its proprietor, Harry Corones, one of the richest men in the west. The number one hotel in Western Queensland with a State-wide reputation for pleasant living, it is at the same time the most western and the least western of any hotel beyond the Great Divide. It is most western in its spaciousness — not the length and breadth of its rooms, but the atmosphere brought to them by the outback people who make it their town headquarters. It is made un-western by the other people who come to it — a wide variety of people who are classifiable only by the fact that they are not westerners. Some of their names in the hotel register make it read like an extract from Who’s Who? THE hotel itself is a long white, double storied building in Charleville’s main street, built in 1929 at a cost of £50,000. Its main feature is the big green summer lounge with the marble floor which you enter as soon as you pass through the doors of Corones. This is where the westerners and the non-westerners meet and mingle and talk things over. This lounge is the hub of social life in the Warrego for eight months of the year. For the other four — the cold months — it moves up to the top floor where the same thing occurs before a log fire. At the back of the hotel there is a sun porch and a piazza. THE story of Harry Corones is the old success story. As a young man of Greek parentage he came to the town 40 years ago, and started a small cafe. A fire set him back, but after he became established in the hotel Charleville, and after that the present Corones. In all the present hustle of his guests celebrating the district’s centenary he’s undisturbed. Grey-haired, with a towel over his shoulder, he shuffled through his hotel on errands of supervision. Assisting him is gentle Mrs. Corones, also grey-haired. His trade connections extend beyond Corones. If you sit down in the dining room you may use a serviette marked Hotel Charleville, or at night you may sleep on a pillow with a label from one of two hotels at Quilpie. These are all operated by his family. If you go dancing in Charleville he will probably dance in Corones’ Hall, next door to the hotel. Outside of business, he takes a prominent part in town affairs, being on the fire brigade, ambulance, and hospital boards. The up-to-date Charleville hospital is his special interest. He is interested in golf but says he is now growing too old to play it and extends benevolent patronage over other sports. But Corones is his chief interest. And he is confident that one day in the distant future Corones itself will celebrate a centenary. – Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld), Thursday 6 November 1947. Source: timegents.com/2017/11/13/hotel-corones-charleville/