John Alston Wallace (1824–1901), storekeeper, hotelier and mining entrepreneur, came to Melbourne in 1852 to try his luck on the goldfields. Within a year, he’d had sufficient success to be enabled to open general stores at Bendigo. He later opened a similar business at the Ovens River (Beechworth) diggings before entering the hostelry trade, establishing the Star Hotel chain throughout northern Victoria. At the same time, Wallace invested in various mining concerns, devoting his energies to these projects after selling his hotels in the early 1860s. Over the subsequent two decades, he built a portfolio that included gold, quartz and lead-mining ventures in the Chiltern Valley and Ovens and Goulburn River districts, as well as in Queensland and New South Wales. A generous donor to hospitals and the Salvation Army, Wallace was elected to the Legislative Council in 1873. Rutherglen, Victoria is named for his hometown in Lanarkshire, Scotland.
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