Thomas Logan

Thomas Logan (30 August 1835 – 12 August 1897) was a pioneer of quartz mining in Otago and was one of few early miners to win enormous wealth from gold mining in New Zealand. Early life and family Logan was born on 30 August 1835 at St Bees, Cumberland, England. He moved to Australia following the Victorian gold rush, and married Mary Ann "Cissie" McGregor in Melbourne; they had three sons. Otago gold mining Logan first came to New Zealand in early 1863, following the gold rush to Hartley's Beach, a bend of the Clutha River in the Cromwell Gorge. He brought with him considerable experience from gold mining in the Victorian fields of Ballarat and Bendigo. Settling in the Cromwell area, Logan found work with mining syndicates sluicing the river terraces of Lowburn, the Upper Clutha and in the Kawarau Gorge. He arrived in Bendigo in mid-1866 towards the end of the alluvial gold mining phase that had made Bendigo a short-lived boom town. Logan was convinced that the alluvial gold in the gravels of Bendigo must be sourced in the gold-bearing quartz reefs in the hills above Bendigo and set about locating them. A fiercely energetic prospector, he had previously prospected for auriferous quartz as far as Blacks, Tinker's and Thomson’s Gullies before his persistence was rewarded when he found several promising quartz reefs on Bendigo Hill.