Mataura Ensign GORE, TUESDAY, MAY 20, 1884. GORE'S FUTURE BUILDINGS.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 7, Issue 358, 20 May 1884, Page 2

Mataura Ensign GORE, TUESDAY, MAY 20, 1884. GORE'S FUTURE BUILDINGS.

A FEW issues back we urged upon the j Gore Town Board the necessity for fixing the permanent levels of the town : it is satisfactory to note that the Board have now authorised their surveyor to undertake the work, on the completion of which builders will be able to carry on their operations with more confidence than in the past. There will be no lack of work for them in the near future. The handsome premises of the Bank of New Zealand will surely spur on the Colonial Bank to erect a honse worthy of the town and district j and there are other indications that lead to the supposition that ere long our main street will consist of a handsome row of brick and wooden structures second to none in Ofcago ! out of Dunedin. It is painfully apparent that all our townspeople are not of this opinion ; for in last Monday's ' News/ the following, probably from the pen of some disappointed contractor, appears : — "The action of fche Waimea Railway Company re their rate has caused quite a s- ay nation in the building trade in Gore, several jobs being withdrawn. To-day (Saturday) I saw a well-known contractor walking about moodily, ' hands in his pockets ;' and later I met one of his employees following suit and loudly denouncing the Company for putting a check on trade — only temporary, le t us hope." We do not blame the writer of such a paragraph as that, because he would probably be either the wellknown contractor or the loud-mouthed injudicious employee, and consequently would be incapable of looking impartially on the state of the town ; \> ut we do blame a newspaper for giving insertion to such utter rot in its columns, and damaging a promising town in the eye of Southerners. The editor's only excuse would be that his head was turned that day by the arrival in Invercargill of Sir Geoege GrBEY, whom he worships with a lamb-like devotion to which there would be no objection if it did not lead the paper into the committal of : such foolish blunders as the insertion of paragraphs that a moment's reflection wonld prove to be untruthful. , But we y did not set out with the intention of criticising either our Invercargill contemporary or the contributors to its columns ; we intended to spaak of the district we represent and of its capabilities for supplying building material of a suitable charac- ! ter for the erections of the future. ? s!hese will either be of brick or stone ; and in view of v the many important , buildings that have been and are likely to be erected in this rising town it is somewhat surprising that our arch tests have practically discarded the latter material mentioned. Ws ' "have an unlimited supply of stone al1} moist at our very door. There are qu&rries at Mataura, Pukerau and Waimea. That at Mutaura may not be wholly accessible to the public, and it is deplorable to see the havoc the Bailway Department are making there of sites thafc in future would have commanded large sums of money for factories and the like; but the stone there ia almost of too valuable a nature ever to successfully enter into competition with the bricks now so expeditiously turned out of kilns in various parts of Southland. Like that from Mataura, the Pukerau stone will always be expensive, because of the trouble of working it owing to its hard nature. Far the base of a building such stone could not be excelled ; but for walls we require something dif * ferent, and there would be no need to go further than Wnimea estate for it. There, partly on private and partly on . Crown land, within easy distance of a railway station, are sites for freestone quarries tbat could turn out sufiicient s'one to last Gore for centuries. This stone has been pronounced by Dr i Hector, the Government geologist, to ! be of a durable and splendid character, and why Southland architects have never given it a trial we cannot imagine. Apparently nothing will suit them but the orthodox and at times unsightly edifices of brick and stucco, reminding one of whited sepulchres. We have all th© material at hand with which we could erect a town second only in beauty to the town of Oamaru ; and it is to be hoped that residents in future who contemplate building will instruct their architects to give thisWaimea stone a trial. We have every confidence that it will be found suitable ; indeed, it has already been tried, with remarkably good results, in the erection of Waimea House, and we believe the railway culverts chat have been built of it have stood remarkably well, and are pronounced highly successful by engineers and others who ought to be judges of the quality of tha stone. If the stone is what it is represented to be, let us by all means have quarries opened both on the Government reserve, and, if agreeable to the Agricultural Company, on its estate also. Let us have an industry created there which will warrant the formation ot a spnall township, drawing its supples from Riversdale or Gore, where we hope yet to see magnificent merchants houses built of this very srone of which we are now writing, Tht-pe ih just u.e bam possibility thafc enquiry may result i . this stone being found so expensive to work that brick buildings wiU still be resorted to in the district. We have reason to believe that it would not ; bufc for the sake of argument^ let^ us suppose tbat we are to build in brick. What of the local industry in this m arerial ? Three of our principal buildings are the Loan Co/s stores and tb© Southland and Criterion Hotels. These i

are all built of brick, and in every case the necessary material has been brought either" from. Invercargill or Duuedin, nearly all from the former. This is not as it shouH be ;bufc we will go further and assert that of all the buildings erected in G-ore during the pasttwoy ears ouly one — the Town Hall — has been partially erected of locally-made bricks. There is surely room, in that industry for more energy and more capital than have yet been employed ; for we have the necessary " raw material," we are certain of a steady demand] even should stone come ioto more general favor at present, and railage charges give a handicap of 25s per 1000 to bricks of local manufacture aa compared wifch those from, say, Bux° ton's afc Makarewa. It need not be pointed out that a great deal more money would be circulated directly in the town if we used Waimea stone and made our own bricks, instead of running out of the district for every stick and every stone put into a building. Too much of our money goes to enrich Invercargill brickmakers and the | Railway Department.