Kapunda

Kapunda is a town on the Light River and near the Barossa Valley in South Australia.

Kapunda is a town on the Light River and near the Barossa Valley in South Australia. It was established after a discovery in 1842 of significant copper deposits. The population was 2,917 at the 2016 Australian census.

The southern entrance to the town has been dominated since 1988 by the 8-metre (26 ft) statue of Map Kernow ("the son of Cornwall"), a traditional Cornish miner. The statue was destroyed by a fire in June 2006 but was rebuilt.

Francis Dutton and Charles Bagot, who both ran sheep in the area, discovered copper ore outcrops in 1842. They purchased 80 acres (32 ha) around the outcrop, beginning mining early in 1844 after good assay results. Mining began with the removal of surface ore and had progressed to underground mining by the end of the year. Copper was mined until 1879. There are also quarries near the town which provide fine marble ranging from dark blue to white. Marble from the Kapunda quarries was used to face Parliament House in Adelaide, and the pedestal of the statue of Venus on North Terrace, Adelaide is made of Sicilian and Kapunda marble.Ore was initially exported to Swansea, Wales, but later Welsh smelters migrated to South Australia and the ore was smelted locally by 1851. Typically, the miners were Cornish, labourers were Irish and smelter specialists were Welsh. Trade and agriculture were Scottish and English. German farmers and timber cutters at nearby Bethel had already been in the area. Underground mining became more difficult as the mines reached deeper. A steam engine to drive a water pump was installed in 1847, replaced by a larger one in 1851. Mining operations ground to a halt in 1851 with the impact of the Victorian gold rush, restarted in 1855. In 1865, the mine was leased to a Scottish company which switched to open-cut mining methods and replaced the smelters with a different treatment method (cooking the ore with salt to produce copper chloride). Copper prices fell in 1877 and the mine closed in 1879.

A railway from Adelaide was opened in 1860, and extended to Eudunda and Morgan in 1878.

The Corporate Town of Kapunda was established in 1865 to form a local governing body for the township and the District Council of Kapunda was established the following year to govern the surrounds.

The Baptist Church building was constructed in 1866.Kapunda is known for being the home of Sir Sidney Kidman (1859–1935). He was a major cattle pastoralist who at one time owned 68 properties with a total area larger than the British Isles. He held annual horse sales at Kapunda with up to 3,000 horses sold during the week. His house, Eringa, was donated to the Education Department in 1921, and is still used as the administration building for the Kapunda High School.Kapunda was home to several notable manufacturers of farm and mining machinery: Robert Cameron, Joseph Mellors, James Rowe and Adamson Brothers. It was with this last-named company that T. J. Richards, the founder of one of Australia's largest coach-building firms, started his career.H. B. Hawke and Co., began in 1857 and operated under various names. The firm closed in 1983.

Kapunda had a strong Catholic community and Saint Mary MacKillop visited and established a convent there. St John's Reformatory for Girls operated from 1897 to 1909. The second St Rose of Lima Catholic Church, replacing one designed by Edmund Wright and E. J. Woods built in 1866 and subsequently demolished, was built in 1938, to designs by Herbert Jory in Romanesque Revival style, and has been described as "perhaps Jory's Romanesque masterpiece". The Sydney-based magazine Builder commented that "the long narrow window openings, infilled with cast cement grilles, the design of which has an Eastern flavour, are an interesting innovation".