Greenmount

Greenmount, a rural town, is 25 km south of Toowoomba.

The sequence of European settlement in the Greenmount district began with the McIntyre family and other selectors settling on farms at Emu Creek, about seven km east of Greenmount, in the late 1860s. When the Toowoomba to Warwick railway line was opened in 1886 the Emu Creek siding was placed where Greenmount later developed. Emu Creek became known as Greenmount (1871) and East Greenmount (1910). The siding, however, inevitably became the district service centre, being surveyed and named the West Greenmount Township (1877). The name was shortened to Greenmount in 1879.

McIntyre's widowed daughter, Violet Brodie, opened a store at the (Greenmount) Siding in 1876, pioneering a substantial local business centre. Closer-settlement farms, increasingly relying on dairying, ensured steady support for the town's business. George Essex Evans described the area between Greenmount and Toowoomba as closely-settled, with homesteads and well tilled fields in areas of 45 to 1000 acres. The town had Presbyterian and Catholic churches (with an Anglican one on the way), several shops, a school, a recreation ground and a cheese factory. There were also cheese factories at Mt Sibley (Emu Creek) and East Greenmount, and the formation of the Greenmount Farm and Garden Society in 1910 was further evidence of the district's farm potential. The Cambooya shire offices (1914) were located at Greenmount.

Greenmount's peak population was 746 in 1911, a figure never regained. Greenmount shared a central-place role with Cambooya as the main town in Cambooya shire, but was unable to compete with Toowoomba and Clifton for leadership in a wider area. Dairying ran into difficulties in the 1930s, regained prosperity during the 1940s supplying American services personnel stationed in Southern Queensland, but was reorganised around larger processing plants as road haulage improved milk transport. When Brodie's store burned down in 1957 it was not rebuilt. Railway activity declined when grain silos were built at Cambooya. Since the 1990s there has been some new housing for families wanting rural/residential living, but the business centre has not revived.

Greenmount has the former Cambooya shire offices, a hotel, a memorial hall and heritage-listed war memorial, the Violet Brodie Park, a Catholic church and a primary school (1901). Its census populations have been: