Figure 80: The Hot Springs Hotel, Te Aroha

landing place kept by George S O’Halloran and the Te Aroha Hotel kept by Mr Missen’.²⁴ By 1880, regular river boat services plied between Thames and Paeroa, with a coach service from Hamilton to connect with the train from Auckland. In 1880, gold was discovered on the slopes of Te Aroha mountain and the Te Aroha goldfield was proclaimed in November 1880 (see sec n.3).²⁵ The township of Te Aroha was surveyed on part of the Mokena whanau’s land and the population increased rapidly in the boom conditions of a new mining town.

As Te Aroha township was established by the Crown on Maori land ceded for gold mining, the development of the town proceeded on the basis of leasehold tenures of business and residence sites, provided for in mining legislation. Even when the Crown had purchased all of the Maori land in sections 15 and 17 of the Omahu native reserve, the mining tenures remained in place, but rentals were no longer paid to the Maori owners. Te Aroha residents long chafed against leasehold tenure, whether their landlord was Maori or the Crown, and gold mining in the district faded by the 1890s. In 1914, a royal commission investigated mining tenures in Hauraki mining district and Te Aroha township. In its report on Te Aroha, the commission noted that the Crown had acquired the freehold, but only streets in the original Morgantown and Lipseytown had been proclaimed, that other streets

24.B Goode and A Matthews, Te Aroha Domain Management Plan (Matamata Piako District Council, 1993), p 18 (Stokes, p239); see also Kevin W Wells, A Postcard from Te Aroha (Auckland: Polygraphia, 2003), pp 21-23

25.‘Proclamation of Aroha Gold-Mining Districts Act 1873’, 20 November 1880, New Zealand Gazette 1880, no 110, p1669