Wooden Honour Board with parchment inset behind glass
The communistic Village Settlement here began like most others in 1894 with the arrival of 94 members who had paid their fees to join the settlement and families making a total population of 388 people. The founding chairman was A Brocklehurst and things went well as by the following year there were 400 people in the settlement mainly from new births. The commune had control of over 9,000 acres which they had to clear, level and then dig irrigation ditches across. The government provided resources for pumps on the River Murray but like other settlements the pumps were never big enough. But hopes were soon dashed by the reality of hard work and conflicts and people were leaving the Settlement of Pyap by 1896. In the early days of the Village Settlement the teacher at the government school in Pyap spent half the week in the Pyap School and the other half in the Moorook School. He travelled between the two by paddle steamer. Pyap Settlement was closed down in 1904 and the land was leased to a Melbourne syndicate. Then the district was transformed again when the former settlement district was sold to C.J De Garis in 1913. He farmed the estate known as Pyap Estate vigorously with married family men as his workforce. He occupied the former Engineer’s House built by the government in 1905 when the government assumed control of irrigation systems and he built twelve stone houses for his workers and a stone school room also used as a hall and a general store. The school room was built in 1914 and still stands. He sold his estate in 1921. Unlike most of the Village Settlements Pyap retains one landmark structure from the 1890s settlement. It is a large round stone chimney flue with a stone cap built to vent the steam from the boilers used for the irrigation pumps. It was built around 1895 and is one of only a few structures still standing from the eleven Village Settlement schemes along the Murray from the 1890s.