History – Snells settlers

Snells Beach – we live there, walk there and sometimes swim there, but have you ever wondered about its story?
Originally known as Long Beach, but after James Snell bought 105 acres in 1854, it became known as Snells Beach.

James was a Cornish miner who, with his family of four, had emigrated to NZ. After working at Miners Head on Great Barrier he took up a job as underground manager at the coppermine on Kawau, living for a short time in a cottage in Mansion House Bay, before buying the land. A year later he moved his family into a four-roomed cottage at the beach.

My Great Uncle Tom Wilson writes of rowing his mother, Florence (nee Snell), down the Mahurangi River and then walking over the hill to her parent’s house to visit. He also talks of Christmas family gatherings at Snells with as many as 46 relatives staying in one or other of the two Snell homesteads or camping. A time looked forward to by the children when they would swim, gather oysters and pipi, fish from the rocks and sail or perhaps gallop a horse along the beach.

Kawau Bay was also renowned for the sharks that would gather in the shallow bay in summer. For centuries, Māori from the Coromandel area had harvested and dried the shark meat as an important food source. During the early years of the Snell family at the beach, there would have been the summer smell of hundreds of drying fish.

There are stories, too, of several hundred gumdiggers living in tents on the beach from the 1890’s. Several thousand tons of gum were extracted, but could only be dug when the tide receded. It was still being dug during the Depression of the 1930’s as an alternative source of income. My mother swam at Snells Beach in the 1920’s when she was five or six years old. She recalled going to stand up in the shallows, only to find the water over her head when she found herself in a hole left by the gumdiggers.

In 1910, Susannah Snell and husband William Phillips took over the Snell farm from her brother. Susannah was the youngest of the nine Snell children. Her eldest daughter, Lucy Phillips, one of five daughters, became a teacher and never married. Lucy ended up with around 100 acres of the old farm, some of which she sold to her relative, Alf Mabbett. After Lucy died in 1971, the remainder was sold to Broadlands and so began the major settlement of Snells Beach. The old cottage was demolished in the mid-1970’s, but a plaque was placed below the oak tree in the reserve at the bottom of Snells Beach Road. The oak grew from an acorn that Sir George Grey had given to the family.
If kauri gum interests you, the museum is putting a small display in the Snells Beach Library during June.