In 1938, Walter John Enright wrote of the district's traditional owners: "When the first settlers arrived in Seaham, the land was occupied by the Garewagal, a clan or sept of the Worimi.

In 1877, a massacre at nearby Wallalong was recounted in correspondence published by the Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser: "[Traditional owners] suffered a good deal of injustice at the hands of some of the first settlers, and there is now living a man who was present, as he admits, when a party had formed for the purpose of punishing the blacks for pulling the cobs of maize in the field, and carrying it off in their nets to their camps.

Observing some smoke rising from the midst of the Wallalong bush, they armed themselves with muskets, and reached unobserved the camp, where a considerable number of men, women, and children were.

The rest fled through the bush, pursued by the whites, and the whole of the natives took to the water intervening between the brush and the high land, towards which it gradually deepened, and some of the poor creatures were drowned.

[9]"Reflecting on the massacre, the correspondent goes on to remark that: "The haymakers in the Wallalong fields have little suspected the occurrence of these tragical scenes on the exact spots where they have stood when engaged in their peaceful occupation.

[9]"While the exact location of the massacre is not provided, an account of floods in 1857 describes how "the first breach it made was at Wallalong, whence the water gradually found its way over a considerable portion of Bowthorne, Hopewell, Barty's Swamps (sic), and all the low lands in that direction".

The stories they used to tell us about the brush thereabouts being haunted by a great tall animal like a man with his feet turned backwards, of much greater, however, than the human stature, and covered with hair, and perpetually making a frightful noise as he wandered about alone, made me sometimes doubt whether they were themselves really terrified, or were merely endeavouring to scare us away; but I very strongly incline to the latter opinion.

We were too well used to that lonely tree-guarded silence, broken only by the clink of the rising saw, and to the damp unsunned ground, with its thick brown covering of thousandfold rotting rustling leaves, to have any very important new sensations to acquire hereabouts.

Some of the prominent settlers from this time included Alexander Warren at “Brandon”, Henry Carmichael at “Porphyry”, Walter Scott at “Eskdale”, and James McClymont at “Ahalton Farm” (now Brandy Hill).

The first organised gang of its kind in the Lower Hunter, the bandits called on James McClymont and his young family at "Ahalton Farm" (now partly within Brandy Hill) in July 1825.

Described as "very industrious, much esteemed, and respected by all who knew him", Saward "left a wife and four children to deplore their loss" when he fell from a spring cart and died on the road between Seaham and Hinton in November 1848.

[11] Franklin’s visit predated the construction of the more substantial Porphyry House with cellar, although the carriageway she describes would later arrive at this second, symmetrical homestead with two wings on either side of a recessed verandah.

[16] When this house and its contents of early colonial records and furniture was destroyed in a 1939 bushfire, the destruction was described by the Newcastle and Hunter District Historical Society as a “national calamity”.

[11] Upriver, about midway between the punt crossing and Porphyry House, a Mutual Improvement Association Hall had been built (circa 1865) and a Mr Abel Pyres kept a butcher shop somewhere in proximity.

Eight years after Warren's death, Fisher replaced the original house with a 'handsome country villa' built of bricks made on the estate and rendered with cement to resemble stone.

It was reported that "no expense has apparently been spared to make the premises as complete as possible" and it was swiftly decided that the new villa at "Brandon" afforded "the greatest credit on all concerned".

[11] Almost destroyed in a 1926 bushfire, and saved "only with the greatest good fortune" after catching alight in the more serious 1939 conflagration, the School of Arts endures as the only original public building in Seaham today.

Built near the intersection of Dixon Street and Clarence Town Road, a junction known as 'the turn o'er the ways', Thomas McDonald's two-storeyed Seaham Hotel carried the name of the much earlier public house that had operated from the old pound in the 1850s.

Mr E. Piper, the visiting coroner, made a finding of accidental drowning and the young man was buried at the Seaham Cemetery under a headstone that was "erected by a few of his friends".

[44] Twenty years earlier, and directly across the road in Dixon Street, the former Cottage of Content had met a similar fate, killing 84-year old Martha Sweeney who had been locked inside "to prevent her from wandering about [at night]".

Writers were also drawn to the area, among them J. H. M. Abbott who wrote a story titled "The Witch of Frasers Flat" about a sorceress who kept a small cottage at the foot of a mountain near the punt at Seaham.

[49] He would go on to establish a communal settlement at Mount Remarkable, South Australia, preside over a Buddhist boys school, serve as a magistrate, and write books on The Battle of Life, The Human Soul, and the Occult and Psychic Phenomena.

War had been declared in Europe and by 1916 the Porphyry wine label had been sold to Lindemans and the vineyard uprooted, ending eighty years of winemaking at Seaham.

In a cruel twist of fate, Boag lost a second son, John, in December 1925 in a buggy accident within sight of his home "Burnbrae" and the Knitting Circle Memorial.

This earlier roll did not include the female population but did pick up some of the male residents on farms at "Langlands" and "Mount Torrence" who by 1919 would have been considered living at Glen Oak.

A local correspondant, describing the mood in the hall that night, writes: "After the excellent spring, which seemed to give promise of a good season, dairy farmers generally are feeling anxious because of the prolonged dry weather, and their share of the cyclonic conditions will not easily be forgotten.

If it were not for its rare showing of geological strata and the fact that its new weir is always in the news, and the Williams River with its low banks is used for water ski-ing and sculling, few people would know of its existence".

Engineers expected a rock wall would remove salt from the upper reaches of the river, allowing it to be pumped through a canal across Balickera to a drinking water supply dam at Grahamstown.

At a total cost of $10.5 million, and after the weir was eventually sealed, it was opened in March 1979 by the NSW Deputy Premier and Minister for Public Work, Jack Ferguson.

At a cost of $300,000, it provided "the security of flood free access for the people living on the eastern side of the river as they bring their products to the markets and saleyards at Maitland".