Much of the original township has been destroyed by fire, and little remains other than Amherst Cemetery at 235 Avoca Road, Talbot.

[3]: para 13 Nowadays, the size of Amherst is approximately 33.7 square kilometres (13.0 sq mi).

Additionally, the Colonial Police Troopers were stationed in 1849 on the highway to Maryborough at a place widely referred to as Daisy Hill.

Furthermore, newspapers of that era often loosely referred to Clunes Station, 10 miles (16 km) east as the "Pyrenees".

Daisy Hill (Amherst) gained notoriety due to an illegitimate gold rush in 1849 when exiled shepherd and former Parkhurst prison inmate Thomas Chapman sold 38 ounces of gold to Collins Street, Melbourne jeweller Charles Bretani.

[4][5] : pp 96–102  Chapman vanished soon after the sale, and uncertainty surrounds where the nugget was actually found, or whether it was stolen.

On 22 October 1858, Amherst became a borough, which included the town of Talbot (formerly known as Back Creek, where miners rioted against Chinese prospectors three years earlier).

During the 1860s, there was a hospital (closed in the 1930s), a court of petty sessions, seven general stores, three hotels, various tradesmen's enterprises and a diverse gold mining industry.

It has a collection of documents and photographs as well as school, cemetery and Amherst hospital records and artefacts that present the history of the pioneers and early settlers of the district.