We do not know how long the family remained at Swansea. But we do have a copy of a letter from the Tasmanian Education Department confirming a contract with Emanuel Brandstater to build the first school in Bismarck, then called Sorrell Creek. This was dated May 3, 1877. He built the school and teacher’s residence in five months. The school opened to the anxiously waiting pupils and parents November 26, 1877. The contract price was 190 pounds. It was probably about this time that Grandfather acquired 37 acres up the Springvale Road approximately two miles beyond a precipitous hill above Sorell Creek. There were a few farms in that more level area, before approaching another series of mountains looming in the near distance, one of which was Collin’s Cap. This fertile section is known as “Springvale”, though locally it was always regarded as a part of Sorell Creek or Bismarck. It was all heavily timbered country. Some trees were very large, mighty specimens of many centuries of growth. Not far from the homestead Carl Ulrich was killed by a tree which he and Uncle Fritz had been cutting for a week. They could stand up in the scarf carved by their axes. It was fifteen feet in diameter. When it fell and they jumped off their scaffold this forest giant shot back off its stump and buried Carl beneath its mountainous trunk. On the Brandstater property there was a large log some eight feet in diameter, hollowed by fire. Against this log Grandfather Brandstater and his boys set sappling props and provided a temporary dwelling while the permanent house was being built. I remember this log when I was a small boy. The land was bought for five shillings an acre, about 50 cents today.
The clearing of the land was all hard and heavy work with axe, saw and mattock. With muscle and human grit they literally carved a farm out of the forest. They planted raspberries, gooseberries, black and red currants, cherries, apples, pears and plums, besides vegetables of all kinds. It was a fine productive property in those early days, with men and growing boys to work it. There was a horse and a few cows too, with a well stocked barn with hay where we used to play. Emanuel and his family, myself the youngest, did not live at the homestead but in a smaller house behind August Totenhofer, the father of Howard, Evelyn, Ruben, Lily and George. We were adjoining neighbors and close friends. My very earliest memories are of toddling with someone through the paddocks to Grandfather’s place half a mile away. How tired I used to get, and cry to be carried! But I was no light weight, so the ride was short and the way seemed so long for my tiny feet. From this house we moved down to the “Church House”, a cottage just behind the church. This had been Grandfather Darko’s original home. He was my mother’s father, and being a good carpenter had built himself a fine large house just across the road where he held some acres. The prime piece of land occupied partly by the cottage was given to the church, which he was instrumental in helping to build. The land was fronting the main road and dominated this part of the district.
I ought to mention here that the men of the district of Bismarck had already built themselves a church on the hill a quarter of a mile above the main road, and here most of them worshipped as Methodists. I never inquired if the family were Methodists in Germany; the important point seemed to be that they were Protestants, the Bible being the basis of their faith.
