The farmer's wife has left a trail of enterprise through Gunning, and the bush telegraph is crackling with what she is doing now.

Mrs Medway bought two bundles of mixed Australian hardwood to add to the left-over corrugated iron, salvaged bridge piers and old, blue granite blocks her husband Scott has been reshaping at Mount Pleasant, which they bought in 2012.

In Crookwell, Dalton and Gunning, along the old highway and Fish River people are getting involved, but the story goes back a while, to the last bad drought.

Almost broke, Mr Medway was paying $18,000 every six weeks for wheat to feed his ewes. Mrs Medway helped him bury 300 of them after they died of disease. They had cost $80 a head. Farmers were suicidal. So she went looking for off-farm income.

"I got a job in town in the local cafe," Mrs Medway said. "One day having a coffee with friends – other local farming wives – and hearing of how tough things were for them, and their need of off-farm income as well, I went home to Scott with an idea of starting our own cafe business," she said.

They offered to buy the Gunning cafe. But the owner wanted too much money, so they started another one, the Merino cafe, ignoring the man's warning they would go broke within three months.

"We employed some of the farmers' wives because we knew they could cook, and local children," Mrs Medway said. Setting a cracking pace, she sat down for a rest one day during a lull in trade and fell sound asleep. A friend woke her in time to rescue the mud cake she had popped into the oven before putting her head down.

The cafe flourished. The other cafe owner approached the Medways to buy it. Now in a stronger bargaining position they bought it and ran the two cafes for six months before selling one. Eventually they sold the other one too.

Now the Medways are finished restoring the old Cobb and Co coach stables that bushranger Ben Hall once terrorised in the mid-1800s.

Seven kilometres from Gunning they found the old homestead and stables barely standing under huge elms that sent thousands of suckers through rotting floors and past the rats, rabbits and tangles of wisteria.

A Cobb and Co mail service from Goulburn to Yass called there six days a week before the main southern railway line was extended from Goulburn to Gunning in 1875. In March it will reopen as the Old Coach Stables, a 99-seat restaurant.

Crookwell builder Dylan Dickson advised Mr Medway to go below the ground first when restoring the old stables, to make good the draining and air circulation, before going up. Crookwell stone mason Craig O'Brien helped rebuild the granite walls. Alistair Waine of Dalton sanded and polished the original floor boards and Gunning grazier Eric Dowling provided 200-year-old timber for the bar.

Adept as most farmers are at repairing machines and sheds and recycling, Mr Medway has dressed and refashioned posts, railings, slabs and iron. The sub-floor sits on 120 piers, the same number of people the Medways employed over their years of cafe ownership, when school leavers came and left.

"It was great to hear our junior staff say they were going on to more education, and bigger and better things," Mrs Medway said. The cafes are staffed with farmers' wives and children, which is why the restaurant won't compete with them, its target market being bigger functions like weddings, school functions, reunions and corporate training.