Memory box
New Zealand is a country of acronyms. We talk about the BNZ, DoC, and the RMA but can occasionally forget that some folk won’t have any idea what we are talking about.
And even when you are fluent in Kiwi acronyms, they don’t remain fixed forever. So, whereas I used to work for the HPT [New Zealand Historic Places Trust] that organisation has since been rebranded as HNZPT [Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga] and if you shorten HNZPT to HNZ then you might be talking about Housing New Zealand!
A commercial building in Ohaupo provides an example of a historic acronym, which probably doesn’t have much currency today.
I certainly didn’t know what F.A.C. stood for, until I checked PapersPast that is. The Farmers’ Co-operative Auctioneering Company Ltd was established in the Waikato in 1907, having bought out McNicol & Co.; by 1920 its annual turnover was over £2.8 million. In the same year, stock sales and sheep fairs were held at 36 and 14 venues respectively, and branches and stores were operating across the region. Between the wars FAC also opened garages, including one in Hamilton’s Barton Street.
Ohaupo’s FAC building was directly across the road from the saleyards. A
1955 aerial photograph held by the Alexander Turnbull Library shows the building with only the southern gable of the two that now adorn the parapet, which once bore the name of the company. The stays that help to support the verandah don’t appear have been in place in 1955, but the magnification is not sufficient to be 100 per cent certain of that.
The building is scheduled on the Waipa District Plan and listed by HNZPT. Te Awamutu Museum holds a
1911 catalogue for the FAC’s ‘Annual Ohaupo Sheep Fair’, which had been a landmark event since the late 19th century. The FAC’s second annual sheep fair at Ohaupo in February 1909, offered 18,000 sheep for sale, including 500 Lincoln, Romney, Leicester, Shropshire and Southdown rams.
The company’s building in Ohaupo was doubled in size in 1914 and was described at the company’s annual meeting of March 1915 as ‘a convenient and handsome building’.
Council records state that it was built in 1895 for Souter & Co., a Cambridge firm of ‘grain, timber and artificial manure’ merchants that had a presence in Ohaupo from 1892 until c.1903.
Tender notices for the building, both the original portion and its later addition, have thus far proved elusive. The Waikato Times did however report in November 1881 that Mr WJ Hurst was in the process of building a seed and manure store in Ohaupo. Given that Souter & Co. took over Hurst’s business in 1892, I’m wondering if that might be a piece to add to the puzzle.
Waikato FAC continued until 1970, when it merged with its Auckland equivalent to become Allied Farmers’ Cooperative Ltd. The FAC branch store in Ohaupo has accommodated hospitality and retail uses in recent years and the saleyards site across the road has been redeveloped.
Now, beneath the shelter of the verandah, with its decorative posts, the noise and smell of thousands of sheep are a distant memory. But I’d hazard a guess that the initials FAC still lie beneath several layers of paint on the building’s northern elevation.