The small South African gold-mining town that has been completely abandoned for 136 years

The tiny village of Millwood, which was once the site of a brief gold rush in the 1880s, is now a ghost town after being abandoned 136 years ago.

The town is situated in the foothills of the Outeniqua Mountains in the Western Cape, about a 50 minute drive north of the coastal town of Knysna.

Gold was first discovered in the area in 1876, when a farmer named James Hooper found a gold nugget in the Karatara riverbed between Knysna and Sedgefield.

After a local pharmacist confirmed the piece was made of gold, Hooper took it to Charles Osborne, a government engineer stationed at the nearby Swartvlei lake.

Osborne sent the nugget to the Cape Government, who awarded him and Hooper with £100 and requested further investigation of the area for more gold.

Hooper and Osborne used the capital to dig a 50-foot shaft at the site of the original finding, but stopped when their search returned no results.

Osborne continued prospecting in the area until the Cape Government reassigned him to work in Port Nolloth, on South Africa’s northwestern coast.

News of Hooper’s discovery spread, with prospectors illegally entering the forests around Knysna in search of more gold.

In 1880, mining engineer Thomas Kitto and Cape Government geologist Edward John Dunn discovered alluvial gold in the area near Jubilee Creek.

After reporting favourably on their finding and the potential for gold mining near Knysna, John Barrington was appointed as mining commissioner for the town.

By 1883, as many as 200 prospectors from countries including Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom had moved to the area in search of gold.

A Diggers Committee was formed to maintain law and order, imposing a nominal mining license fee of 1 shilling per claim per month.

The committee began lobbying the Cape Government for official proclamation, which was granted on 6 January 1887 with the declaration of Millwood as open for public digging.

From gold-rush to ghost town

By this time, a small village had begun to develop in the mining area, with formal buildings being constructed to replace the tents that had been set up previously by the miners.

Within a few weeks, 135 buildings had been raised in the village, including boarding houses, a post office, a police barracks, and a hospital.

Four hotels were built in Millwood alongside six shops, a committee room, and an agent’s office, while a post-cart service was set up between the town and Knysna.

Millwood had three local newspapers with the Millwood Sluice Box being the first, followed by the Millwood Eaglet and the Millwood Critic.

When the Cape Government declared the goldfield open at the beginning of 1887, it elected to raise the nominal fee from 1 shilling to 10 shillings per claim per month.

The official record for gold production in Millwood that year reached 655 ounces (18,568.94 grams), and by the next year gold had been found in quartz veins on at least forty registered claims.

Approximately 1,000 inhabitants had moved to the goldfields by this time, with 400 of them living in the village of Millwood itself.

By May 1888, however, neither the shaft diggings nor the alluvial finds were producing many results, and the diggers and businesspeople began to relocate elsewhere.

Many of them moved to the Witwatersrand in search of better prospects, where a large gold reef had been discovered two years prior on the Langlaagte farm by George Harrison.

The last of Millwood’s diggers, shopkeepers, and officials had left the area by December 1890, leaving the village to become a ghost town.

The Millwood Goldfields were officially declared abandoned by the South African Government 34 years later with the passing of Government Proclamation No. 294/1924.

In 1988, the Millwood Goldfield Society was formed by local residents from Knysna to preserve the area’s historical significance.

SANParks took over management of the area in 2010, with the abandoned goldfield now a popular tourist attraction falling under the Garden Route National Park.

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Photos of Millwood:

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