The story begins in 1876, when James Hooper found what he believed to be gold-bearing gravel in a creek off the Karatara River, on a farm called Ruigtevlei near Rheenendal. The town chemist, William Groom, confirmed the presence of gold. The creek was later named Jubilee Creek in honor of Queen Victoria's Jubilee. Charles Osborne, an engineer building the road from George to Knysna, received a grant of 100 pounds from the Cape Government to prospect the area. He started work at a sawmill operated by the Thesen family -- giving the site its original name, Woodmill -- but found nothing. When he returned years later, others had beaten him to it. Thomas Kitto and E. J. Dunn, the Cape Government Geologist, had discovered alluvial gold and reported favorably on the area's mining prospects in 1880.

In 1886, the Cape Government declared the area open as public diggings, and John Barrington was appointed the first Gold Commissioner. Osborne returned and found a promising reef in the Homtini River catchment, but together with Thomas Bain -- the celebrated pass-builder -- he compiled an unfavorable report and tried to discourage a rush. The warning went unheeded. Some two thousand reef and alluvial claims were pegged across what became the Millwood Gold Fields. The news traveled fast, reaching the United Kingdom, California, and Australia. Within weeks, a village of 135 stands had materialized in the forest, complete with hotels, boarding houses, general stores, a post office, police barracks, and a hospital. Mail service between Knysna and Millwood began weekly and quickly increased to three times a week.

The Bendigo Gold Mine was one of several operations that sprang up around the village. In December 1887, the Oudtshoorn Company installed a large crushing plant. But the geology was uncooperative -- the gold-bearing veins ran through heavily folded rock formations that made extraction difficult and unpredictable. Some of the gold appeared as large nuggets, tantalizing enough to keep miners digging, but the total yields were never commercially viable. By December 1890, virtually all the mining companies had folded. The prospectors drifted away to the Witwatersrand, where the real South African gold rush was already transforming Johannesburg. Millwood's population, never more than a few hundred, dwindled to nothing. The indigenous forest -- the same forest that mining operations had begun to damage through clearing and road-building -- crept back over the abandoned claims.

What remains of Millwood is now a walking trail through the forest, about 5.5 kilometers from the old mine sites to the Materolli Museum -- its name a corruption of 'Mother Holly.' Old mining equipment and artifacts from the rush have been recovered, restored, and put on display at the museum and at Monk's Store nearby. The ghost town's cemetery still stands among the trees, its headstones recording the names of people who came from three continents chasing a fortune the forest never intended to yield. Millwood House, originally built in the gold fields, was later moved to Knysna itself. Today, visitors to the museum are advised to try a piece of what locals call Jayne's World Famous Chocolate Cake at the Materolli Tea Room -- a reminder that even failed gold rushes can leave something sweet behind.