Hello again.
As can possibly be guessed from the minutes, this request is to do with local pioneer history, more so than specifically with genealogy. Though I've lived all my life in the Waikato, and studied the early pioneers, it was only in more recent times I learnt of the setting up of the small drainage board so that funds could be jointly raised, to poke a tunnel drain through 20 chain of a clay rise on the banks of the Mangawara River, allowing the locals to drain a peat lake on the other side and releasing some 2,500 acres of land for development. In some ways they were too successful with the drainage, as they could not continue to deepen the tunnel, as the peat consolidated, so were eventually forced to go the long way, of additional mileage of drains through neighbouring farms, to gain fall to the river. For me local accounts and Drainage minutes prove to be very interesting reading. For a start there were a large number of drainage boards but like with the roading boards of a generation earlier, it was not long before the boards were forced to amalgamate, as no farmer liked additional OUTSIDE traffic past his gate on local ratepayers roads, or upstream water, now wanting to more readily flood down over, or under, water logging his farm.
Following drainage, the big breaks were to come some 60 to 80 years later when in the late 50's copper was recognised as the missing trace element, and chisel ploughs became the implement of choice, to work very large quantities of lime into the soil. These few acres being only a speck on the original Woodlands Estate of nearly 90,000 acres, of what is now prime Waikato Dairying land.
- Alan.
