Springwood real estate

The Springwood area's first occupants were the Oryang-Ora, an Aboriginal people. They belonged to the Dharug, a wider group whose country reached across the Sydney region. They settled there about 40,000 years ago, and the area holds many rock carvings and art sites.

Oryang Jack led the clan at the time Europeans arrived, and the French artist Pellier drew him. The name Oryang-Ora also pointed to the dividing ridge line, the ground that set the Dharug peoples of the north apart from the Gundungurra peoples to the south.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie and his wife paused in 1815 at a spot Macquarie described as a spring. The town that grew there took the name Springwood, with "Spring" from the springs nearby and "wood" from the Mountain Blue Gums, or Eucalyptus deanei, of the area. The founding of the town is dated to about 1815, and its main street took the name Macquarie Road after the Governor.

The first railway line went through the Blue Mountains in 1867, and Springwood's station followed in 1868. A larger building in the Victorian Gothic style took its place in 1884, built under the direction of John Whitton, the Chief Engineer of NSW Railways, with a porter's cottage to the west. The station is the second-oldest surviving one in the Blue Mountains. It is on the Register of the National Estate, which no longer exists, and it also has a New South Wales heritage listing.

Braemar was built in 1892 by James Hunter Lawson. The large single-storey house sat on sixty acres on Macquarie Road. It was a family home, and at other times a boarding house and a convalescent home, a guesthouse and a private home again.

The Blue Mountains City Council took the property over in 1974. A restoration was carried out as a Bicentennial project, and the building reopened in 1988. It now holds a community gallery and centre run by volunteers, and the local library stands in a new building behind it.

Christ Church Anglican Church dates from 1888 and 1889, when it was built beside the Great Western Highway. Extensions came during the 1960s and later in the 1980s. Its architect was Sir John Sulman, who kept a holiday place at Lawson, and the design is Victorian Academic Gothic. Among the Anglican buildings of the Blue Mountains it is the oldest, and it has a heritage listing.

The house put up as a vicarage, though it served only as a private home called Southall, also has a heritage listing. A sandstone Gothic Presbyterian building went up on Macquarie Road in 1895. The Catholic community began within a parish based at Penrith, gained a building of its own in 1892, St Thomas Aquinas Church, and that church has since moved to grounds at Winmalee.

Bushfires in October 2013 badly affected a small part of Springwood, and larger parts of Winmalee and the village of Yellow Rock nearby. Across those places 193 residential properties were destroyed and 109 were damaged.

Heritage-listed places in the town take in walking tracks in the Blue Mountains National Park, the Anglican church on the Great Western Highway, the Buckland Convalescent Home on Hawkesbury Road, and the railway station on the Main Western line.