The Coal Creek Community Park and Museum Korumburra — 50th anniversary celebration: Full gallery

The Coal Creek Community Park and Museum in Korumburra marked its 50th birthday with a big celebration on the weekend. See the full picture gallery.

The Coal Creek Community Park and Museum in Korumburra marked its 50th birthday with a big celebration on the weekend. See the full picture gallery. Picture: Jack Colantuono

A Gippsland tourist attraction that takes visitors on a journey back to the 19th century has marked its 50th anniversary.

The Coal Creek Community Park and Museum in Korumburra — a recreated coal mining village featuring buildings from the 1879s to the 1920s — shows how people worked and lived on the coalfields and the early agricultural development of the area.

The park’s 50th birthday celebration started at noon on Saturday and featured live heritage and history displays, food, music, theatre, film, exhibitions and rides.

Team leader Kim O’Connell said ahead of the event it was important to honour the park’s history.

“It was an incredible community effort to get the park set up and opened,” Mr O’Connell said.

“There were some very clear-eyed people back then who worked very hard to save a lot of heritage buildings from the South Gippsland area and managed to get an ongoing lease for the land.

“They were really keen to recreate a coal mining village that showed what was the dominant industry for a fair period of time.”

Mr O’Connell said celebrating the park’s 50th birthday acknowledges all the people who have volunteered their time to help make the park it is today.

“It’s a moment to bring the past, present and future together — all in the one bag,” he said.

The Coal Creek Community Park and Museum in Korumburra has reached a milestone since it opened in 1974. Picture: Facebook

“The event will be both a celebration of the heritage where we will have people dressed up in their Edwardian and Victorian colonial finery.

“We will actually have quite a lot of family members from the actual families who ran the businesses that the buildings represent — so grandsons, great grandsons and granddaughters.”

It comes after the Old Gippstown Heritage Park in Moe celebrated their 50th anniversary celebration last week.

The Herald Sun was there to snap pictures of the crowd enjoying an action-packed day.

See the full picture gallery.