Henderson Brothers' Sawmill, Upper Kaimai (Part One)

by John and Julie Green

Alf and Dave Henderson working on a kauri tree

Alfred Henderson was born in 1882 in Whitianga and developed his love of working with timber at a young age. His first job at twelve was as a “pack boy” with the driver of a bullock team in the local kauri forests. Next, he went tree felling with his cousin Dave. He met his future wife Laura Adamson in Thames and they were married there in 1905, with twins following soon after. He soon became bush manager for Ellis & Burnand at Mananui in the King Country, where they had four more children. Before 1914 they bought land near Rotorua and Alf continued to do bush work to help finance the farm. The whole family survived the flu epidemic and a serious house fire in the 1920s, after which they moved to urban Hamilton. 

Travelling to work, bushman-style

Alf began logging and milling white pine near Aria in the King Country in the early 30s, at the height of the depression, and his son Roy was a hauler driver. The workers were busy ten hours a day, six days a week - they earned four pounds per week, a decent income in very hard times. However, the conditions under which they worked and lived were very primitive. The kahikatea grew in swamps where the men had to wear waders. Wielding their crosscut saws and axes and moving the felled logs in this terrain would have been challenging. Roy met and married local girl Dorothy Williams and their first home was a leaky lean-to on the side of the mill office. There were eight married and six single men and their unlined houses were very basic with no plumbing or electricity. The roofs leaked as corrugated iron was re-nailed each time the houses were moved to remain near the work sites. 

Back of the mill and shed housing the Judd steam hauler

By 1936 the call for timber milling was increasing and the white pine getting scarcer, so the Henderson Timber Company was formed by Alf and his much younger brother Fred. They bought the rimu milling rights for a hundred acres at top of the Kaimai Range. Most of the men and families from the Aria camp relocated to the new site, where a mill was constructed to harvest rimu for the local Tauranga and Waikato building trades. Harry Christian from Lower Kaimai was the mill carpenter, while Charlie Anderson was manager (from 1936 to 1945), blacksmith and planer operator. After a couple of years there Fred set up his own mill in Matamata in 1937 and later supplied pine boxing timber for the construction of the Karapiro Dam. Their nephew Harold was involved in carting timber from both mills.

Judd steam-hauler being relocated

The Kaimai mill was electric-powered, but the felled logs were hauled directly to the mill skids by a large Judd steam-powered hauler. As the logging operations moved further from the mill a tramline was constructed and the Judd hauler was moved out into the bush. A second hauler was introduced later, with logs being dragged from one to the other to save extending the tramline.

Rake of logs leaving for the mill (note size of rimu logs compared to workers)

There were two petrol-powered rail tractors and eventually 11.5 km of tramlines for transporting the logs. One was a 1926 Fordson farm tractor converted to run on rails by the Union Foundry in Stratford, the other a 1930s Graham Page truck converted for rail use in 1937 by the Tuakau Motor Garage. Three trucks were used: a Diamond T, an International and a Ford articulated transporter. Another block of bush near Ngamuwahine was also selectively logged by Frank Wilcox, and logs carried up to the mill with an ex-army GMC truck.

In the early 1950s Alf was concerned that there were still large quantities of tawa standing unused and so, along with other millers in the district (see blog article on Tuhi Harvey), a treatment procedure was developed. The extra timber was then able to be felled, milled, treated and utilized, mainly as flooring.

Roy Henderson on his RD7 Caterpillar

Alf’s son Roy drove an RD7 bulldozer on contract, and would take Dolly the draught horse up into the bush each Monday morning, where she dragged the winch ropes to the felled logs. He would take food up there for her each day and bring her home at the end of the working week. His daughter Jean recalls that on Friday nights she and her siblings would go to meet their father and ride down to the mill village on Dolly. In the early 1940s Roy had a nasty accident when a log bridge he was crossing gave way. The family moved down to Tauranga and, after a slow recovery from a punctured lung, he returned to work in the bush daily.

Mill workers

Alf’s other son Bob was the office clerk and yardman. He spent the war years away, about four of them as a POW. Sometime after his return, he married and had a family; they lived in Tauranga, but Bob remained working at the mill until it closed in 1957.

Part 2 to follow

Sources

Memories of the time we lived at Upper Kaimai, 1936-1945, by Eddy Anderson
Henderson Mill, a Landmark, by Ron Lipinski, Bay of Plenty Times, 25/10/2006
Sawmilling Days in the King Country and Kaimai Range from 1933-1945, by Dorothy Henderson
Recollections of the Henderson Timber Company’s Mill, by Dorothy Henderson
More Recollections of Mill Operations, by Bob Henderson (appeared in a 1988 booklet, Kaimai Revisited - 75th Jubilee of the Kaimai School)
The Era of the Bush Tram in New Zealand, by Paul Mahoney, Transpress, 2004
Personal recollections of Jean Cole (daughter of Roy Henderson) and Esme Crawford (daughter of Fred Henderson)
Help with initial images Bill Coster, long time Kaimai Resident
Images courtesy of the Cole family