Timaru Milling Company

A couple of weeks ago David McBride wrote an article on the red brick industry in Timaru.

Our red bricks are beautiful and add a warmth and depth to our town that can’t be repeated with precast slabs! The iconic Timaru Mill Company building is said to have been the largest mill in New Zealand at the turn of the century. It was built in 1882 by James Bruce to replace a wooden mill that had burned down on the same site in 1881.

The integrity of this structure and its significance as the mill that revolutionised the flour milling industry in New Zealand make it an outstanding industrial structure in our town.It was the first mill in New Zealand to be fitted with rollers rather than grindstones, an outcome of James Bruce visiting the US with samples of NZ wheat and realising a better grind could be achieved with a roller system.

This explains its substantial height of six storeys. The grain was hoisted to the upper level then fed into a series of roller mills until it reached the lower floor where the ground flour was sifted, bagged and shipped.

This building was built to last.

Internally ironbark was used as storey posts and corbels; the whole building was completely laced with iron which was a new feature in building at that time, making it very strong. It has many arched windows at each level and is very symmetrical in appearance. Other internal features include a considerable amount of early machinery still in place, the polished wooden floors, and the spiral sack slide which connects all the floors. It remained in continuous use for over a century with very few modifications before closure in 2005. - Karen Rolleston