PROGRESS OF TE AWAMUTU.

Auckland Star, Volume XLV, Issue 34, 9 February 1914, Page 4

PROGRESS OF TE AWAMUTU.

NEW- POST OFFICE OPENED. THE CHANGE IN FIFTY YEARS. The opening of the new post office and the unveiling of the dock presented by Mr. Wm. Taylor (Green Hill) made a dual ceremony on Saturday afternoon, at which the Hon. R. Heaton Rhodes (Poet-master-General) interestingly reviewed the progress of the town. Fifty years ago, he. pointed out, Te Awamutu was known as Otawhao, and that time the local postmaster wae Mr. J. E. Goret, now the Rt. Hon. Sir John Eldon Goret. In 1864, when Mr. Mansel Ross was postmaster, the name of the place was changed to Te Awamutu. In those early days the post office transactions were few and comparatively infrequent. As a matter of fact, the mails, which came by horse and coach from Auckland, took as long over that distance of 100 miles as it now takes to bring a letter by post from Invercargill, in the extreme south of the South Island. Even in 1908 the transactions of the money-order and savings bank department numbered only 200; last year there were more than fifty times that number of transactions; while during the last three years more than a quarter of a million of money was handled over the post office counter. Mr. Rhodes took occasion to compliment Mr. Taylor on the excellent public spirit he had shown in his donation of £200. which had enabled the town to be the possessor of the town clock, which looked out from the new post office tower. The Minister was banqueted at Te Awamutu in the evening.