Figures from Lawrence's rich past loom large on the town's main street.
Four new more than 2.1m-tall sculptures of characters from the 1860s and 1870s installed recently in Ross Pl represent prominent members of early Lawrence, says director and past-chairman of the Tuapeka Lawrence Community Company Peter Cummings.
The company, which started the Lawrence Information Centre, undertook beautification projects in town and publishes the Tuapeka Times, has installed the four bollards to draw people into the town.
While some people stopped in Lawrence on the drive between Dunedin and Queenstown, many international tourists navigated the South between Queenstown, Fiordland and the Catlins without coming to Lawrence, Mr Cummings said.
The town needed to do things that would attract more tourists.
The town's first three bollards - of Helen Munro, Gabriel Read and Black Peter - were installed about three years ago. The four new bollards were added in August.
One represents Lawrence schoolteacher John Joseph Woods, who in 1876 wrote the music to accompany Dunedin poet Thomas Bracken's God Defend New Zealand.
He later went on to become the first county clerk of the Tuapeka County Council in 1877.
Beside that bollard, at the entrance to Gabriels Gully, is a bollard in the image of John Stenhouse, an Edinburgh-born Lawrence teacher who taught for 46 years in the area.
Bollards representing Archibald McKinlay and Edward Herbert, who came to Lawrence in 1862 and established a successful trading business around the goldfields, stand near the town's grocery store.
The bollards were made by local artists Francine Keach, Gloria Jackson and Angela Meecham.
Les Bray, who runs ''The Junque Shop'' next to the statues of Mr Woods and Mr Stenhouse, said the bollards were already a success. On the first day they were installed, he saw a motorist passing through town stop her car and return to the bollards. She then bought a coffee at a nearby cafe and did a little window shopping.
Mr Cummings said ''a couple more'' bollards could be installed in town.
