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even in Australia. It made additions to the buildings in order to cope with increasing demands. Then, in February 1889, it too failed. The Mosgiel Woollen Company now acquired the factory, added more large rooms and changed the name to the ‘Canterbury Woollen Mills’. In 1902, at the end of this period, the Mosgiel Woollen Company was taken over by a group of Dunedin businessmen. They sold the Ashburton mill to John Lane and Pringle Walker who had been partners with others in a similar concern in Timaru. In 1904 the two men joined Alfred Rudkin in his Christchurch hosiery firm. But both remained in Ashburton where they became pillars of St. Andrews Church. Lane helped promote the Scottish Society and Walker supported musical organisations and the Allenton Sports Club.

The opening of the Ashburton Cheese and Butter Factory at Flemington, in October 1882, was a result of the same felt need to diversify which had inspired the Industrial Association. After several years of poor grain harvests, local enterprise recalled the suitability of the one-time Longbeach swamp lands as cattle pasture. This factory also cost much more than expected—about three times the estimate—and C. Percy Cox, now a member of the Ashburton firm of Matson, Cox and Company, moved a vote of censure on the management at the first annual meeting. However, by then the factory had been in satisfactory operation for over a month. In the following year the company was only narrowly defeated in a competition for a government bonus for the first fifty tons of factory-made cheese to be exported. In early 1883, half a ton of Ashburton cheese was loaded on the British King with the first cargo of refrigerated meat to leave Lyttelton. However this concern, too, was forced to increase the share capital, apparently failed to find support and, on 10 May 1886, went into voluntary liquidation. By this time the enthusiasm for a similar venture, which Wakanui farmers had showed in 1882, had long since evaporated.

Slump conditions were responsible for both the amount of prospecting being done and the excessive hopes raised by mineral discoveries, especially those of crystals resembling diamonds. In early 1883, an engineer named Jacobson found what he thought might be diamonds up the valley of Taylor’s Stream and a short distance from Alford Forest. No local geologist of repute—von Haast included—agreed with him, but some ‘experts’ were so certain that the stones were valuable, that they refused to accept