Waimate’s Centenary

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27404, 17 July 1954, Page 6

Waimate’s Centenary

This week-end the people of Waimate, town and district, are enjoying the pleasant and stimulating experience of celebrating a centenary and reliving a century of progress and change. The history of Waimate, which was broadly surveyed in an article in “ The “ Press ” yesterday, is one in which the residents can take a just pride. They are fortunate, perhaps more than some of them realise, that their district has remained essentially agricultural; the town itself derives its prosperity from the prosperous countryside that it serves. The Studholme brothers, who were the first to settle in the district—within five years of the start of organised colonisation in Canterbury—had a good eye for land; and the fertility and productiveness of this land have well rewarded the good husbandmen who have farmed it, ever more intensively, for 100 years. An early and, on the whole, very successful government land scheme at Waikakahi helped to set the pattern of closer settlement; and Waimate has maintained a Dominion-wide reputation over 60 years or more for the quality of the fruits and vegetables produced from its smallholdings. Through the years the countryside itself has remained beautiful and unspoilt, in spite of change. For the town itself, separation from the main south highway through the exigencies of transport engineering has not proved the disaster that some residents feared. Though not isolated, Waimate has been spared the worst of the noise and rush z of modern road traffic; it may, longer than most towns of its kind, be spared the indignities of urban sprawl. In its gracious setting of green hills, the town maintains a serenity that the dwellers in cities and most rural towns might well envy. But it is a purposeful serenity; for Waimate is very much preoccupied with the

business of the land and those who work the land—which has been New Zealand’s most important business for more than a century, and will be New Zealand’s most important business for as much of the next 100 years as can be foreseen.