mers rather than townspeople. By 1882, only seven buildings existed in Yeppoon and were predominantly holiday accommodation for travellers. This changed the following year with the commencement of regular stagecoach services from Rockhampton, and the continued mining of copper and gold in the coastal hinterlands around Cawarral and Mount Chalmers.
By 1889, the town was growing steadily, and boasted several hotels and boarding houses, a sugar mill, a telegraph service, a Methodist-Presbyterian church, and Yeppoon's first state school which is today a heritage listed building.
With primary production the lifeblood of the town, better transportation was needed, not only to Rockhampton but along the coast as well. Bullock trains were proving unwieldy, especially when passage to the north of town meant waiting for the tide to go out, so in 1893, a new road was hewn into the cliff-face of The Bluff on Yeppoon's Main Beach.
Steam wagons followed and the north of Yeppoon opened up to new commerce and communities. Pastoral Lands and settlements now filled the landscape from Woodbury and Byfield in the north, inland through Bungundarra, Lake Mary, Tanby, Mount Chalmers, and Cawarral. South of Yeppoon, all arable lands through Taranganba, Lammermoor, and Mulambin were also claimed as far as to present day Causeway Lake.
South of the lake, progress was also running full steam. The new town of Emu Park was taking form with the completion of the first coastal railway from Rockhampton in 1889. Even at this early stage of Capricorn Coast history, Emu Park and Yeppoon shared an odd rivalry, with Emu Park attracting the more elite section of Rockhampton and Mount Morgan society, while the "common man", especially gold miners from Cawarral and Mount Chalmers gravitated towards Yeppoon.
With Emu Park separated from Yeppoon by the expansive Causeway Lake and the shifting dunes of Kinka, that sense of separateness between the two seaside towns
