Daily Photo – Evening at the Railway Hotel in Winton
There are towns you can imagine being named after politicians, explorers or some long-forgotten gentleman with a suitably impressive beard. Then there is Winton.
The story begins in the late 1850s, when stockman Thomas Winton was moving through Southland in search of strayed cattle. At some point, he stopped beside a small stream and made camp. It was hardly the sort of event you would expect to leave much of a mark on history, but the stream became known as Winton Creek.
And then, as these things sometimes do, the name stuck.
When the Southland settlement was formally established in 1861 and the township surveyed in 1863, the fledgling town inherited the name of the stockman who had once camped beside its creek.
These days Winton sits about 30 kilometres north of Invercargill, a quiet Southland town surrounded by some of the country’s best grazing country. But long before there was a main street, a railway or a town clock, there was Thomas Winton, a drover, some wandering stock and a night spent beside a little stream.
Not a bad legacy for simply stopping for the night.
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