Motel Childers

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Hotel Childers is a heritage-listed hotel at 59 Churchill Street, Childers, Bundaberg Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from to 1930s. It is also known as Queen's Hotel. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.HistoryThe Hotel Childers was built in at least two stages in the late 19th and 20th centuries and is one of several hotels built to serve the prosperous and growing centre of Childers.Following logging of the dense Isis Scrub in the 1870s, Childers, in the heart of the scrub, was promoted in the 1880s by Maryborough interests, as an agricultural district. The land in the immediate vicinity of the present town of Childers was surveyed in 1882 into 50-acre farm blocks. There was no official town survey; Childers developed following the private subdivision of portions 870 and 871, at the railhead of the 1887 Isis railway line from Isis Junction railway station. This was opened in 1887, and was intended principally to facilitate the transport of timber from the scrub.The coming of the railway not only promoted the development of the town of Childers; it also proved the catalyst for the establishment of a sugar industry in the district in the late 1880s. At the opening of the railway, Robert Cran, owner of Maryborough's Yengarie mill, announced that he would erect a double crushing juice mill at Doolbi, to supply his mill at Yengarie. This was completed in 1890 and further expansion of the sugar industry in the Isis was closely related to the activities of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company, which erected a central crushing mill in the district 1893-94. By 1895, at least three other mills had been established in the Isis, with another two under construction, and Childers had emerged as the flourishing centre of a substantial sugar-growing district: in the years between 1891 and 1900 the population grew from 91 to 4000.