Dannevirke hotel with history for sale
Denice Speedy didn’t realise she had a connection with an old hotel in Dannevirke before she and her husband bought it.
A relative died in a fire there in 1954 – one of the big moments in the Mangatera Hotel’s 129-year history.
Denice and Donald Speedy have had their own part in the High St hotel’s history for the past 26 years, but are looking to sell it to the next in a long line of owners. The business has an asking price of $2.85 million.
Donald Speedy said they were selling so they could spend more time with the couple’s three grown daughters and their families.
Speedy was proud to have put his mark on the hotel’s history. ‘‘Every manager and owner has added something to it – a bit here and a bit there. I’ve just done the same.’’
Bayleys Napier real estate agent Roger Howie said he’d got inquiries from across the country, but there was no deal on the table just yet.
The Mangatera Hotel has been part of Dannevirke since almost the beginning.
Local historian Pat Mills, a volunteer at the Dannevirke Gallery of History, said the original Mangatera Hotel was built by pioneer settler Lawritz Triis in 1888.
The one-storey hotel proved a popular watering hole with the mostly Scandinavian lumber workers, but burnt to the ground only two years later.
The hotel rose from the ashes just months later.
The Mangatera’s second building lasted 63 years before it too went up in flames in 1954.
Mills said a newspaper clipping described a devastating fire that claimed the life of a 60-year-old guest. That guest, a farmer, was related to Denice Speedy, she discovered after buying the hotel.
The inferno was so intense it blistered the paint off the walls of neighbouring buildings, and Mangatera ‘‘fell into smoking ruins’’ by 7.30pm, the article said.
Mills said this was almost the end of Mangatera. Under the liquor licensing rules at the time, the hotel could only have a 24-hour gap in trading before losing its licence.
The reapplication process could have delayed the hotel reopening long enough to put it out of business. So the hotel’s owner had little choice but to salvage a keg, throw up a trestle table and sell a couple of pints beside the ruins the next morning.