Over the hill in Oturehua the locals have their fingers crossed that their pub will find a new publican after Grahame and Liz Jones, now hitting 70 and ready to retire after 17 years at the Railway Hotel, have put it on the market. If it’s not sold by June 1 it will close.
For locals and rail trail riders that would be a tragedy. I also shed a tear at the thought of a pub-less Oturehua.
It was the coming of the railway which reinstated a hotel in Oturehua (Rough Ridge until 1908) and, naturally, it was called the Railway Hotel.
If you plan to buy the pub you might appreciate something of its early history.
Joseph Kealy was the first and possibly the briefest host at the hotel. He left Ireland in 1862 and came to Naseby from where he wrote home in 1863 and that’s the last his family heard from him until his sister made inquiries years later.
By 1870 he was gold miner and a prominent member of Naseby’s Irish community.
His claim to notoriety came in 1878 when he was jailed for ducking Ah Sin in a pool of water after seeing the Chinaman assaulting David Mowat. Kealy old the court, ‘‘I felled the Chinaman into the water — both the Chinaman and myself being much excited. I thought Mowat was killed.’’
A petition for Kealy’s release saw him freed after paying a £5 fine.
In a heart-rending appeal for public support Hayes wrote, ‘‘he has executed a distress warrant on our little home containing seven children ranging from 13 years down to five months old — and in the middle of a howling arctic winter with nothing round
but about a foot of snow, and still it comes. Mr Caldwell’s action has stopped my credit and I have no money to pay cash. I am working on some valuable inventions which will in a short time bring in enough to pay my creditors and provide us with the
necessaries of life.’’
Hayes’ inventions did, indeed, save the family and were the beginnings of the thriving Hayes’ engineering works.
Otago Central Railway construction gangs were by now approaching Rough Ridge and in 1899 Caldwell built a new 16-room hotel near the station site.
The Mount Ida Chronicle enthused: ‘‘Mr. Caldwell carries a good name with him from over the Hill, as one who does not lay himself out for all possible gains from his business, but as one who will not spare himself for the advancement of his neighbourhood.’’
Caldwell put Kealy into the new hotel and built a store over the road with Michael Foohey who had worked at Caldwell’s Wedderburn store as manager. Foohey died early in 1902 and the store was bought by Thomas Gilchrist, so beginning another Oturehua business saga.
Caldwell took over the hotel November 1900 until March 1903 when Arthur Islip became the licensee. Islip constructed a dam behind the hotel which became the home of the Rough Ridge Curling Club.
When Arthur was declared bankrupt in 1907 the court was left to sort out the position of his wife Lizzie who had put £290 (about $65,000 in 2026) of her own money into the purchase of the pub.
In 1907 James Caldwell died and an obituary noted, ‘‘he was a great favourite with the travelling public during his occupation of the two hotels at the terminus of the Otago Central Railway’’.
In 1908 ex-miner Michael Doyle, yet another Irishman, was licensee of the Railway Hotel which had been bought by his wife Mary Anne.
Michael died in 1912 and Patrick Lynch bought the hotel for £1150 (about $240,000) in December 1913 and married Frances McEntyre of Arrowtown six months later.
Such is the history of Oturehua’s Railway Hotel up to the outbreak of World War 1.
There’s still more than a century worth of tales to be told but in the meantime the quest is on to find a new owner. Let’s hope it succeeds.
• Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
