Hello.My name is John Graham. This is a brief story of my lifeI was born into a farming family in Scotland in 1816I married Hannah Rogers at Dumfries near Glasgow before emigrating to Canada and settling on a farm near Paris in OntarioDuring the quiet farming times I built barns in the district for other farmersWe had two children, Rebecca in 1845, and James in 1848It was to my enduring sadness that Hannah died soon after James’ birthThen along with the two children my sisters Jane and Helen we emigrated to Australia where Jane, the children and I settled in BeechworthA gold rush was in full swingThere was a strong demand for building and saw milling skills which offered plenty of work for meHowever with the rapidly expanding population in Beechworth food supplies were very limited and when some land came up for sale on the Oxley Plains I purchased a 120 acre block On the way to Beechworth I had noticed the suitability of the this land for farmingThe sale took place on December 28th 1857There were no trees on the block so clearing the huge Eucalypts that grew on the Plains was not an issueThe idea was to grow grain, fresh fruit and grapes to sell to the passing gold traffic as it passed the nearby cross roadsIn order to store the sheaves of grain I built a hay barn using logs, poles and bark from the forest in the hills to the south east. The bricks in the wall were hand made from local clayHaving grown up in snow country I pitched the roof steeply to shed the snowI married again to Fanny Wills however our relationship was not strongMeanwhile, Jane took care of Rebecca in Beechworth and as she became older Rebecca spent more time with me At the tender age of fifteen Rebecca commenced a private school on our neighbour’s land opposite where the Church of England was later builtIn 1864 she married George Harry Brown who had settled on a recently surveyed 92 acre block of land at the Hurdle CreekThe Oxley Plains now has many farmers mainly grain cropping and sheep