A brief history of Pebble Church
Welcome to the Pebble Church, a local landmark for generations.
In the 1860s the area was Peter’s Diggings, the result of a rush for alluvial gold in 1858. Soon there were around 1,300 miners with their families on the bustling tent-covered diggings on the nearby hill and creek flats to the north, two quartz crushing mills, three hotels and a brewery, ‘dancing saloons’, a Common School, bakery and other businesses as well as pastoral and agricultural activity. Peter’s Diggings was a thriving community.
Miners and other residents lobbied for a church to be built to serve the spiritual needs of the burgeoning community. For some years services had been held in the local schoolhouse and then at Edelsten’s Hotel. A building fund was established and the foundation stone of St Peter’s Church of England was laid in May 1869. By 1870 the Church had become a place of worship and a venue for community gatherings including weddings and baptisms. At the time it was described as ‘one of the prettiest little churches in the colony’.
In the 1870s Peter’s Diggings became Carapooee, a local indigenous term possibly alluding to the local quartz stones.
The Pebble Church is unique for a church in Victoria, the structure faced with quartzite pebbles set in pinkish mortar. The stones and construction materials – as well as money – were provided by the local residents, men taking time out from mining their claims to cart the waste stone to the site. Children on the Diggings did their part, helping to collect stones from nearby Douglas’s Hill and carting them to the site in wheelbarrows.
The Church of England invited other denominations to use the church and so it became a meeting place for the wider Carapooee community, central to the social fabric of families for generations including throughout both World Wars and the Depression.
By 1924 the local businesses had closed and the Church along with the school became a community gathering point for those who remained. Today the Church is the only remaining building from the earlier Peter’s Diggings.
The Pebble Church and its contents were listed on the Victorian Heritage Register in 2008. An annual service was held at the Church until it was deconsecrated in 2019.
In 2020 the Pebble Church Community Group solicited financial pledges from the local communities and descendants of early residents, many of whom remain in the area, and negotiated the property’s purchase by the Pebble Church Heritage Association Inc. which manages the site today.
