Ashhurst Notes

Feilding Star, Volume IX, Issue 153, 26 July 1888, Page 3

Ashhurst Notes

fFKOM OUR CORRESPONDENT.] The Foresters have made a start with their hall for Ashhurst. It is quite a creditable building, 25 x 52ft., to be fitted up with stage, &c, and to have sitting accommodation for two hundred persons. The erection of the frame came near putting Ashhurst to the trouble of providing another venerable man to fill the future mayoral chair, as, while assisting, the mayor elect slipped and fell among the joists, fortunately he sustained no injury beyond the loss of a little skin. Of course your readers have been told something about the hot (or warm) spring, which is to benefit, or be an attraction to, Ashhurst. There appears to be heat enough to cause steam to rise from the ground in such quantities as to be seen from some distance and possibly the water may contain minerals rendering it valuable for medicinal purposes, but we are awaiting an analysis before building a sanatorium and inviting the halt and maimed to it. I hear that one of the local sawmillers contemplates supplying his men with Btores, " nolens volens" those refusing to take the stores to find their wages in the window some fine morning. If he carries this out it will be a great mistake and will land him into a host of disagreeables. Quite a buzz has been kept up over the work the Kiwitea Road Board is letting up the Pohangina. Contractors from the towns round inspecting the roads to be made, and I should judge a good uumber ef tenders will will be sent in. Yet there appears a greater scarcity of workers than work, for I know of one or two cases where tenders for bushf elling were advertised for without any being sent in. In view of the formation of the roads in the Harbor Board Block, the Manchester Board should bestir itself and finish the Pohangina road. I hope the warden for No. 6 ward is keeping that road " steadily in view," I shall as long as I remember my last trip along it. And I promise him I will keep him up to the mark. Perhaps the champion unfortunate family of New Zealand lives in this district. Pioneers do not expect all " beer and skittles" in the bush, but Mr Hans Smith, a steady hard working settler in the Foxton Small Farm Association, has had misfortune enough to drive him out of the place, in the short time he has been on his section. When starting for his holding with a load of provisions, in crossing the Pohangina river the tail board of the cart dropped out and away went a grindstone, bread, coffee, tea, bedding, and boxes of various kinds into the river about half his load being lost, a short time after one child chopped off the end of another's finger, then another cut his leg with an axe, then came near burning and gouging his eye out with a fire stick. Next, the father, felling a small tree, it sprang back, fell on his leg, broke it a little above the ankle and pinned him to the ground. His own son and a neighbor's boy, being near, managed to get the tree off, Smith put his leg straight himself, but had to wait till next day before Dr Porter, of Paloierston, could get to set it. About three days after his eldest boy, about eleven years old, gashed the inside of the calf of his leg with the blow of an axe. I am very sorry for him and his wife , ten miles up the river, only one neigh - bor for miles, three or four small children, while the father and boy need all her attention. The other day I received a hint of an agreeable surprise awaiting the public in connection with mining on this side the ranges. Good ore has been found equal to, if not better, than the Woodville ore ; but for obvious reasons the finders names, and exact locality, are kept secret just yet.