In January 2020 my Dad and I did a motorcycle trip up to the town of Quorn, which is about 350km north of Adelaide.

Quorn was originally a railway town that was established in the late 1800's. Like a lot of railway towns in Australia, when the railway left, so did the people. These days Quorn has about 1000 people living in it, and is a popular tourist destination for people wanting to explore the Flinders Ranges.

Although the town may not have the population that it once use to have, it still has many of the old buidlings that were built in late late 1800's and early 1900's when the town was at its busiest.

We took a walk through the town and came across an old house that was most likely built in the early 1900's. To our amazement the house had a porch (verandah) on the front of it which was held up by turned posts that were almost an exact match to one of our stock posts that we had been making for over 25 years.

If you have a look at the photo below; the post in the middle is the Federation Round style (code AP002). We started making this post in the mid 1990's and have not changed the design since. The post on the right is one of our new posts that was used on a restored verandah in Quorn. The one on the left is an original early 1900's post on an old original verandah in Quorn. It is quite amazing just how close the design is to the one that we make today.

I asked my Dad how this was possible. He told me that before we went to the large expense of producing the tooling required to make these posts on an automatic wood lathe; we use to do these posts by chisel on a hand lathe. Over the years customers would come into our factory with an old post that they had pulled off the porch of their early 1900's Federation style home, and they would ask us to reproduce them. We had a lot of different designs that customers asked us to do this for; but for whatever reason, Dad liked this design and we decided to make it one of our stock profiles.

To think that 25 years later we would come across the same design post in the same town but that was made 100 years apart.

This post as well as the other stock designs that we produce can be found in our online shop.