Page:Addisons·Flat•Moloney•1923.pdf/17

 the Old People’s Homes in the Dominion, a few are at present in Westport, and the O’conorO’Conor [sic] Home of this town. To meet them and talk to them, of the old golden days of the Coast, their conversation of the bygone days are most interesting. Two of the oldest Identities of Addison’s are in the O’Conor Home. Pat Galvin, about 92 years of age and Mr Bill Millikin who is just turning 95 years of age and both are as hale and as hearty of lads of 30 years, in spite of the hardships of the pioneering and the hard toil that they did in the gold mining claims.

To-day the population of Addison’s has just dwindled down to five householders, namely, the McCanns in the Shamrock Hotel, the Jost family who live down in Galvin’s house on the river flat down Mountain Creek, Bob Neel, who is residing in the old house of his parents and who is a County roadman, Mrs Kane and S. Williamson, at Bald Hill. The gold mining days are finished and from the top of McPaddon’s Hill on the North until you reach the Totara river on the South there is nothing but a vast long and wide stretch of pakihi land, so far of little or no use for agricultural or pastoral purposes. At the Cawthron Laboratory in Nelson, the pakihi soil is being tested, and we, of the Buller district trust that science will prove that this sort of waste land will some day be made into green fields and when that time comes there may be a township with the same population (4,000) as there was in the year 1867 at Addison’s Flat.