South Taranaki 1881-1886

South Taranaki 1881–86: farming for what?
Writing on 19 February 1886 the Hawera correspondent of the Auckland Weekly News told of discussions going on in the town as to the future use of the Tawhiti flourmill. Built in 1881, this fine building, with excellent water power (‘motive enough to turn the universe’), well situated half a mile from the town and a quarter of a mile from the railway station, was up for lease on very reasonable terms. There was some agitation for it to be used for a meat tinning works, to fill the gap left by the collapse of Patea's West Coast Meat Preserving Company, following the destruction by fire of its works the previous May. The other proposal being mooted was a woollen mill. Al-though the district as yet had no dairy factory, no mention was made of this as a possible use. In fact the building shortly reopened to continue as a flourmill under a new owner, George Ogle. He finally closed the business and dismantled the mill in 1910. Today the dominant farm processing concern in the district is the giant Kiwi dairy factory at Whareroa. Local resi-dents must find it difficult to imagine a time when the farming options seemed wide open, and discussion on them could ignore dairying. As late as 1883 the storekeepers of Patea, Hawera and Normanby were complaining that dairying was being neglected in the district and they were having to import a large proportion of their butter