Ōtautau - Township Businesses- Central Garage, Froude's Ownership, March 2020

Prior to the current owners today (2022) Central Garage was owned by Graeme & Shirley Froude, father of present owner Keith Froude and his wife Thelma. The family have owned the garage since 1973.

These photos were taken by myself (the digitising archivist of this new community heritage project) and they were snapped during the first Covid Lockdown in early 2020 to show the effects of the pandemic on the local businesses in Ōtautau. I felt it was important as a community historian and archivist, to preserve the events of the pandemic for future generations to observe the changes in life for us all. I always say that today's events are tomorrow's history so thought I had better practise making sure that I collected as much as possible of it. I note as the garage now sports a lovely sunshine yellow paint, all the Covid posters strangely compliment the bright colour palette of the building!

Of note, as someone who worked in the vicinity of this building for around 6 years, usually the doors are open and the yard is full of vehicles being serviced. As the Covid Lockdown only allowed for "essential services" to remain open, many businesses including this one saw a large downturn in work and customers, although in rural areas like ours, this was less, due to the continuing necessity of maintaining the agricultural industry, which our district and town heavily relies on.

It is of note that this building has one of the oldest histories of any in the township. The site started off as the towns very first General Store in 1876, run by Robert Campbell for many years. It has now been made into a Motor Garage for most of it's long life, with a range of different names and owners. More can be seen about this in a prior entry on its history under CWA.159.105.010 so look out for this that.

Some of the earlier owners and garage names are recalled by Peter Campbell, a grandson of one of the town's early residents as being:
JH Thomas & Co
Norman Guise
Bob Buchanan
Western District Motors
Tom Milburn
Frank Hazlett
George McMillan
Jack Anderson
R (Bob) L Thomson
Bill Ireland
And finally the Froude family it is still currently owned by.

Information above is researched by and copyright under a CC BY Licence to “Between River & Stream”, early history of Ōtautau book, and is kindly gifted by that project to our online community archive so everyone can view it.

This account will definitely be added to, as we have had quite a few people from the district continue to donate quantities of photo and record documents to the archive, which we are extremely privileged to have been gifted to share with you all. Time constraints alone at this moment, have prevented all of these from being shared right now.

However, if you or anyone you know has got any more photos, information or accounts of this building, the varying Motor Garages run from here over the years, or on any aspects of business or community life that has taken place here, make a comment in the space provided under the image page. Please let us know if you have more records to add to these, so we all benefit. Kia ora, thank you.
Central and Western Murihiku Southland Archive via DigitalNZ

http://api.digitalnz.org/records/50737078/source

#Settlers #Agriculture #Murihiku #Pioneers #Southland #Fuel #MotorGarages #GeneralStores #TransportOrVehicles #DigitalOnlyImageInArchive