The Restdown Hotel opened to mining prospectors and the travelling public in 1880. It was located to the north of Nymagee, on what was then the intersection of the roads to Cobar and Mount Boppy near the base of Mount Kalumba, which is actually named “Restdown Peak“ on some early maps.
Michael McKenna was the first known licensee and he oversaw the running of the hotel for 12 years until it appears he fell into financial difficulty and went bankrupt in 1892.
An advertisement in 1883 describes the Restdown Hotel as having an iron roof, and containing nine well-constructed rooms, a hut, kitchen with store attached, two four-stall stables, stockyards, and a water tank ten yards from the kitchen that had supplied the wants of the hotel for the past three years.
Charles Laird, who had briefly held the licence at Shearlegs, was also publican at the Restdown for a short time. But in 1894 Henry Goodwin, formerly of The Bluff Hotel, had the good fortune, or perhaps shrewd judgment, to take up The Restdown Hotel licence.
A few months after doing so, Goodwin discovered a gold-bearing reef just a few miles from his hotel. The Restdown goldfields weren’t to deliver a big fortune to Goodwin, but he continued to work them with varying success for the next decade. He still held a colonial wine licence for his hotel at Restdown until at least 1908.
Henry Goodwin died at Nyngan in 1927.