It is little known that Wainuiomata has a history of gold exploration and prospecting.
Although timber milling and agriculture were Wainuiomata’s principal early industries, historical records also contain scattered reports of gold prospecting in and around the valley.
One late nineteenth-century account mentions a surveyor named Mr Spencer, who reportedly discovered auriferous, or gold-bearing, quartz in Wainuiomata. A sample was said to have yielded gold at a rate of 1 ounce and 9 grains per ton. Spencer subsequently obtained a lease and intended to form a company to develop the discovery.
Mr Sinclair, an early Wainuiomata settler who owned substantial areas of land in Reservoir Valley and the surrounding district, was also reported to have found quartz containing between 2½ and 14 pennyweights of gold per ton.
Another report concerned George Knight, the manager of a property at Lowry Bay. Knight, described as an experienced gold miner, produced promising specimens of both alluvial gold and gold-bearing quartz that he claimed to have found somewhere inland between Lowry Bay and Pencarrow Head. At the time, however, he declined to disclose the precise location.
The alleged discovery of gold in the Wainui-o-mata Valley was also raised before the Hutt County Council. A letter from a prospector named Mr Moore claimed that he could identify payable gold-bearing reefs in the valley. As a condition of revealing their location, however, he requested that the gold duty collected from any resulting mining operations be granted to him for fifteen years. The council agreed to honour the arrangement for the remainder of its own term of office, but declined to commit future councils to the same undertaking.
Another report concerned a prospector named Cooper, who was said to be well known in the South Island for his success in searching for gold. After receiving permission to prospect on private property at Wainuiomata, Cooper spent two days examining the area and reportedly returned encouraged by what he had found. He believed that gold was present in the range separating the Hutt and Wainuiomata valleys and collected stone samples that he intended to have crushed and tested. The account also noted that rumours of gold discoveries in the same range had circulated the previous year, while its correspondent called for government or commercial support to help prospectors investigate the district’s mineral potential.
Despite these accounts, no significant gold-mining industry developed in the district. The reported discoveries may have involved small quantities of gold that were uneconomic to extract, while some claims may never have been independently verified. Other reports later suggested that stories of gold in Wainuiomata had been greatly exaggerated or were little more than a hoax.
Listed below are news articles that have recorded this part of Wainuiomata’s history.
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