Ballance Reminiscences

Manawatu Times, Volume XL, Issue 13949, 30 July 1918, Page 3

Ballance Reminiscences

WHERE THE “TIMES” CAR RUNS. AN IMPRESSION. A stretch of flat, rich land caught between the everlasting hills of the Tararua Range and the everlasting waters of the Maugahao, farm houses set in shelter belts of evergreen trees; orchards bereft of loaves, stark and bare in the wintry weather; gardens which will later bloom in beauty; roads ■which wind between the holdings till they finally converge in the train mote to Woodville on the North and Pahiatua on the South; a settlement which boasts a church and a public hall, such is the Ballance of to-day. Yesterday of 30 years ago it was a trackless, heavily timbered country where the tui sang and wild pigeons perched, w'hore the huia hunted the hu hu grub and wild pigs rooted in the fern. Ballance was the first land settled on the deferred payment scheme of the the then prime minister, John BalBallance, and its original holders, of whom some still remain, took up their sections at the price of 25s per acre, with ten years in which to pay it. Strangely enough, but few of the original owners were farmers born and bred, and some good stories are still told of the anxiety and interest caused in the settlement at the arrival of the first calf! However, the years went on, and in 1894. the Ballance dairy factory was built, and like many similar concerns had many ups and downs, till finally the Ballance Co-operative Dairy Company was formed and acquired from the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company, into whose hands it had fallen, the factory and plant, as a going concern for £IBOO, and the company grew and flourished till if became a household word in the dairy world. But cheese began to assert its claims, and so appealed to a section of the shareholders that they seceded from the parent company and sot up the Tararua Co-op. Dairy Company for the manufacture of cheese at the other end of the district, and this, too, grew and flurished. And now, so insistent has become the demand for cheese, the once powerful Ballance Dairy Company has crumbled to pieces and disintegrated itself into various factories each Avith its small body of shareholders engaged in the making of the more solid product. But the Ballance Co-operative Dairy Co. still exists. Phoenix-like there has arisen from the ruins of the old company a small hcav one which has purchased the old factory for the sum of £4OO and is noAv engaged in renovating the old buildings and installing plant for the neAV manufacture as Avell as overhauling the machinery of the old. There is a post-office store, too —a store in Avhich is collected a vast variety of everything without a great deal of anything, and where with much flurry and scurry, with a honk and a whir-r-r, the mail arrives daily in a motor and is daily despatched -with much scattering of mud or dust as the day may be. Of course there is a school, Avhich now boasts a staff of two teachers, for in Ballance babies abound. There is much social life, too. Never a soldier departs without a farewell gathering and a farewell gift and there are church functions also. The dear old-fashionod “tea meeting” is an institution here, and on a recent occasion the well -filled tables testified to the. houscAvifcly art of the Ballance ladies in no uncertain way. A prosperous, pleasant little settlement is that of the Ballance of to-day, with the morning paper, the “ManaAvatu Daily Times”, delivered at its gates. A resident blacksmith in the immediate future, and the price of its acres has increased forty-fold!