About
About the society
The Tarrow & District Historical Society was founded in 1961 and has run the Ropewalk museum since 1996. It has one paid staff member and about 40 volunteers.
01
The building
Aldous & Penhale, rope and twine makers, built the ropewalk in 1868. A ropewalk has to be as long as the longest rope you want to make, so theirs ran 330 metres along the river, a low brick shed with a hackling loft at one end where the raw hemp was combed.
For 103 years the works made rope for river barges, farms, wells and the town’s bell ropes. In 1911 it employed 64 people. Nylon rope, made faster and cheaper elsewhere, closed it in 1971. Three years later a storm brought down the roof over the far 234 metres, and that section was demolished.
The 96 metres that survived are the museum’s Long Gallery. The tarring room, the hemp store, the counting house and the gatehouse all survived too, and kept their names.
02
The society
Eleven residents founded the society in 1961 at a meeting in the Mechanics’ Institute, the week after the town’s old coaching inn was pulled down. For 35 years the collection lived in members’ sheds, spare rooms and a cupboard in the council chamber.
The Town Council bought the empty ropewalk in 1989. In 1993 the society signed a 50-year lease at $1 a year, and volunteers spent the next three years and 11,000 hours clearing, repairing and fitting it out. The museum opened in 1996. In 2019, 318 donors paid for the platform lift to the Hackling Loft.
03
How we’re run
The society is a registered charity, run by a committee of 9 volunteers elected by members at the AGM each autumn.
Graham Tuck
Priya Hollis
Delia Morrow
Sam Okafor
Lionel Brack
Joanne Mirabel
Ted Wills
Hamish Doyle
Mei Tan
Our one paid staff member is Maren Ashdown, museum coordinator, who works Tuesday to Thursday. She looks after volunteers, bookings and the day-to-day running of the museum.
Registered charity no. 1043 217
04
Annual reports
Older reports are in the reading room, back to the first one in 1962, which is two typed pages.
05
In numbers, last year
9,300 visitors
6,800 volunteer hours
31 new objects in the collection
146 oral histories recorded since 1978, and counting