The sign at number 46 shows two miners pushing an ore cart, with the street name beneath it. It is a small reminder of the gold-rush history behind Sunderland Street.
The street was named in the early 1860s and the town was renamed in 1865. Many of the buildings that still stand went up between then and the turn of the century.
1862 Hartley and Reilly.
An Ohio prospector called Horatio Hartley and his Irish-born partner Christopher Reilly walked into Dunedin in August carrying eighty-seven pounds of gold, pulled from the Clutha through a bitter winter. They handed it over for a £2,000 reward and within the year forty thousand miners had followed them upstream. The town the diggings built was first called Upper Dunstan, then Hartley's. In May 1865 it was renamed Clyde.
Wine arrived soon after.
1864 Jean Désiré Féraud.
Féraud arrived at the diggings in 1863, made his money at a place called Frenchman's Point, then in October 1864 planted vines a few hundred metres up Springvale Road and accidentally started the South Island's wine industry. His wines won prizes in Sydney and Melbourne in the early 1880s. He was Clyde's first mayor. His café still trades on Sunderland Street under his name; the original vineyard is just up the road, which the historic-soil buyers still come to look at.
The street name is linked to John Turnbull Thomson, the surveyor behind many inland Otago place names.
1856-1865 John Turnbull Thomson.
Thomson was a Northumbrian, born 1821 at Glororum near Bamburgh. He surveyed in Penang, ran the Singapore public works for fifteen years, then sailed for Otago in 1856. He named Lindis Pass after Lindisfarne, Mount Earnslaw after his grandfather's farm, Twizel and Cardrona after homeland places. Sunderland Street, the locals will tell you, for the city in Tyne and Wear. The case for the attribution is circumstantial; the pattern is all over the maps he drew.
The railway shaped the village for much of the next century.
1907-2000 The rail trail.
The railway reached Clyde in 1907 and ran for eighty-three years. The last passenger train left on 30 April 1990, four months before the Clyde Dam absorbed the line for good. The track was lifted, the bed was cleared, and in February 2000 New Zealand's first rail trail opened on what was left. The trailhead is four hundred metres from the front door. 152 kilometres east to Middlemarch.
Most of the buildings in this story are still standing. The heritage walks take you past many of them in about an hour on foot.