ARAPUNI'S HISTORY,

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 49, 28 February 1927, Page 8

ARAPUNI'S HISTORY,

WILD HOKSES GIVE PLACE TO CATTLE. TIMBER BOOM OF THE EIGHTIES. (By ANDREW KAY, a Veteran of the Waikato.) The name of the Arapuni district is Manukaututahi, which embraces a considerable area of flat land.' Before the advent of the first settlers these plains were covered with an indigenous growth called wi grass, very succulent and nutritious when young, but becoming hard and wiry in mature growth. If found in the autumn, fresh sweet fee appears, and the land possesses the great advantage of being free from fern, owing to the occasional visitation of a sharp frost. In the late '75, Mr. Goodfellow, grandfather of the gentleman of that name who did so much to develop the dairy industry in New Zealand, had a flock of sheep running on the grassy flats, but in the '70's a mob of wild horses was in command and doing well. At present the land is devoted to the dairv industrv.

Owing to the selling of Patetere lands, in the 'SO's there was a boom in real estate and in timber. Large quantities of split totara posts and totara timbers in the log was being pitched into the Waikato River just about three miles above (.he present electric works and from there floated down stream to Cambridge. Sunken Logs in the Stream. Green totara timber, however, does not always float. Of the immense quantity of logs and posts pitched into the river fully a third never reached Cambridge, and are now lying on the bottom of the river just where they were thrown in. Those lost timbers belonged to the Waotu Timber Company, long since defunct. It is open to some enterprising firm to recover those sunken timbers'_before they are further submerged by the great dam. In pre-war time the Maoris had a plank spanning the river at Aniwaniwa, about two miles above the present works.