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Collingwood
| In 1842,
Surveyor Tuckett found three Europeans living near the pa at the mouth of
the Aorere River. They were building a trading vessel. The tiny settlement
was first named Gibbstown after an influential resident but later the name
was changed to Collingwood, honouring Nelson’s second-in-command at
Trafalgar.
During the gold
boom of the 1850’s the suggestion was made that the town become the
nation’s capital, but the good years soon ended, the miners drifted away
and the gravelled streets with their cleared sections reverted to fern and
scrub. Fire destroyed Gibbstown in 1859, another fire in 1904 destroyed
the rebuilt village and as recently as 1967 fire struck again, burning
down the hall, hotel and two shops.
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| Today’s
Collingwood is a mixture of old and new. Modern
buildings include the
general
store, hotel and memorial hall, while venerable reminders of the past are
found in St. Cuthbert's Church (1873), the courthouse (1901) and post
office buildings. Houses and a tiny campground crowd onto the small
sandspit with the commercial buildings; other houses spread along the
coast to the south or meander up the river bank to the tiny wharf. As
befits a town of this age, there is a small museum in the main street.
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People who enjoy rambling through historic cemeteries and reading stories
of floods, epidemics, shipwreck and other trials of early colonial life
from the headstones should set aside some time to visit the Old
Collingwood Cemetery, whose ornate wrought-iron fences and crumbling
gravemarkers are scattered on a rocky hillslope beside what was once the
coach-road to the goldfields. Access is signposted, either from Excellent
Street (off S.H.60) or along a track behind the Collingwood Area School.
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