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A slice of Matakana’s industrial history is on the market.
The former sawmill site at 362 Matakana Valley Road, which now accommodates several businesses from bespoke building projects to landscaping, is being sold by private tender by Bayleys.
The mill was built around 1945 by the Hodgetts and Vipond families.
Harry Hodgetts was a millwright who moved to Matakana from the King Country, where he was building mills for the war effort. He eventually took over sole ownership and three generations of the Hodgetts family worked at the mill over the next 40 years, until it was sold to Aitken Head Timber, from Pokeno, in 1987.
“It was the last commercial mill run on steam in New Zealand and when we sold, the boiler and engine went to the museum in Kerikeri. We were also the last company rafting logs in the Hauraki Gulf,” Garth Hodgetts, Harry’s grandson, remembers.
“We took the timber off Kawau and Rabbit Islands, and rafted it up the Matakana River. We also milled kauri towed from Coromandel.”
There were a lot of mills in the district when the Matakana Valley mill started including a water-driven mill nearer the Matakana township.
“Roke’s mill, up Wrights Road, had a massive tramway to bring the logs down from the Whangaripo hill.
There was a mill on the Glen Eden stream, behind the Wharehine yard in Matakana, on Govan Wilson Road and Meiklejohn’s mill on Quintals Road.
“My grandfather only expected the mill to last five years because without a way to transport the logs, they could only harvest from the immediate vicinity. But when heavy transport arrived, they were able to keep going.”
At the start, the mill was processing native timbers and pines older than 60 years that didn’t need to be treated. It then transitioned to younger pines that did need treatment, macrocarpa and eucalypts. One pine log they took from Green’s farm in Matakana was 94 years old and weighed 24 tonnes.
At its peak, the mill employed 14 workers “and every one of them was a specialist at some part of the process”.
Lengths were milled in multiples to meet building industry requirements, normally 16 feet (which would produce two eight-foot studs), as well as weatherboard and rafter lengths. Most of the timber was used for local housing and farm buildings, including several shearing sheds with tapered floorboards made of kahikatea.
“The longest length we did was 24ft, which were used to repair scows.”
The mill itself was made up of several stations, starting with the breakdown mill where the logs would be sawn. Then they would either be air-dried or kiln-dried, treated and finally go through the planing shed.
Before loaders, the logs were winched off the trucks and dragged to the breakdown shed.
“You could be up to your knees in mud in winter.”
Garth says there was nothing mass produced in those days.
“You had to be versatile – one day you’d get a request for skirting boards to match an old villa and the next day you’d be producing the curved covering boards for a dinghy. The work was very individual.”
