Historian C.E. Sayers has called Steiglitz ‘a ghost town of golden memory’. When he wrote in 1970 the population was estimated at ten; a century earlier it had been five thousand. The official opening of the Steiglitz goldfield is recorded as May 1853, although reports of the discovery appeared in the Argus on 24 September 1851. The town, named after a family of squatters, peaked in 1865; only remnants now remain.