Daily Photo –  The Gaulter & Sons Grain Store in Temuka

Just how the Gaulter & Sons Grain Store in Temuka didn’t burn to the ground in October 1901 is anyone’s guess. Considering a nearby fire destroyed most of the surrounding buildings but the grain store, is quite remarkable. It’s a bit eerie when you think about a timber structure, filled with dry grain dust and filled with flammable machinery, the places should have gone up like a box of matches! 

Originally built in the autumn of 1889 to provide storage and ease of access to the railway yards across the street, it’s a classic piece of “Kiwiana” and agricultural history that remains standing to this very day. The 1901 fire was discovered around 10:30pm on a quiet Tuesday night in a group of wooden buildings and spread quickly! It destroyed offices, storefronts, the retail portion of the site was heavily damaged and the loss of stock was significant. Yet the grain store survived and remained what it had always been: a busy, noisy, slightly chaotic place, with wagons coming and going, grain spilling, deals being struck, and, occasionally, people sleeping among the sacks.

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Daily Photo – The Royal Hotel in Temuka

So on to Temuka, whose most famous resident was Richard William Pearse. Born in 1877 at Waitohi Flat, just eight minutes from the South Canterbury township, what makes him so remarkable is that nine months before Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the world’s first sustained and controlled flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, Pearse made his own attempt, albeit with a little less style and grace. Where the Wright brothers stayed airborne for a controlled 12 seconds, Pearse’s effort amounted to three seconds of uncontrolled jerking and bumping before crashing into a hedge. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary achievement for a man working in near isolation, removed from society, tinkering away in a farm shed with little more than bamboo, tricycle wheels, wire, canvas, and a hand designed and built two cylinder combustion engine.