Located at 7-11 Keppel Street, the mill has been part of the Bathurst landscape since 1859.

Originally called the Victoria Mill, it was taken over by William Tremain in 1875 and renamed.

The mill complex includes a four-storey industrial building, grain silos and associated structures – the Victoria Stores and the area that contains Bedwells Feed Barn.

Bathurst resident, and the woman behind the newly created Save our Silos Facebook page, Tracy Sorensen has urged people to take action before the building is sold.

“As soon as a heritage building starts changing hands it becomes a vulnerable moment for these buildings ... a heritage order doesn’t guarantee preservation,” she said.

Ms Sorensen said the need to conserve the site becomes more urgent once the building is on the market as developers will spend significant amounts of money to create a development application (DA).

“By the time a DA gets to council a huge amount of money has already been spent,” she said.

“We’re alerting the community that these things might be eternally on the landscape, but they can fall under developers’ plans.

“We could get a block of flats there and it would just look like anywhere else.

“At the moment it would be bringing in a certain amount of rent to the owner, but you could multiply that enormously by creating apartments.”

Bedwells Feed Barn is a tenant at the site, and uses the Tremain’s silos to mix grain.

Owner Chris Frisby said he was concerned what the sale would mean for his business.

“I don’t know what it would mean for our business,” he said.

Raine and Horne Bathurst director Matt Clifton confirmed he had been in discussions with the mill’s owner and that the property would go on the market “in the near future”.

“I anticipate that the sale of this site will generate significant interest from investors and possibly developers,” he said.

“[I] would expect that any purchaser wishing to consider any development on the site would need to work with [Bathurst Regional] Council to ensure that the historical integrity of the site is protected.”

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TREMAIN’S Mill, like the nearby Crago Mill, was part of Bathurst’s milling industry. Both are located in an area once known as Milltown.

The mills grew out of earlier, smaller, milling businesses located elsewhere, but re-located to the Milltown sites to take advantage of the rail connection.

The two mills, among the largest in the Bathurst Regional Council (BRC) area, flourished for decades and used the best milling technology available.

However, both mills, and the area’s milling industry generally, were destined to fail.

New breeds of wheat suitable for the drier western plains and the extension of the railway further west reduced Bathurst’s importance as a wheat growing area.

A concurrent development was the growth of large flour mills in coastal urban centres that used the railway to ship in western-grown grain for milling into flour for sale not only to coastal urban populations, but throughout the state.

Both of these Bathurst mills found they could not compete.

The Crago Mill closed in 1954.

The Tremain Brothers’ Mill continued until the 1980s.

Its closure marked the end of more than 150 years of flour milling in the Bathurst region.