How the Owen River Hotel came to be

In the year 1865, John and Ann Dellow along with their child, left Nelson in a horse and dray to carve out a new home at the Owen River.

The journey took a week, travelling via Top House Road until they came to the Gripps Ford.  From there, they were taken on pack horses for the rest of the journey to the junction of the Owen and Buller rivers where their future home, a small manuka slab hut was built.

John had marked out the junction as the ideal site for an accommodation house.

However, constant flooding led him to build his first Owen River Hotel on a different site where the family lived for several years farming the property.

This place was later burned down and he rebuilt the hotel on the top of the rise.

He later sold the property to John Oxnam who had married his eldest daughter, Mary.

In 1879, a new post office was opened at the hotel due to an increase in the number of men mining at the Owen reefs.

John and Mary lived there for some years until the family grew up and they moved to Murchison to take up a large area of farmlands there.

George Trower was the next owner of the property, however he did not live there very long and sold to Mr William McLean.  The property was described as 52 acres with a hotel of 9 rooms, dairy with water laid on, stables, barn, sheep yards and dip.

William, a South African war veteran, died in 1909, aged 29, and the following year his wife Annie married Len Newman.

Len was born in Blenheim in 1854.  On the death of his mother the family moved to Owen River to take up farming.

Len was apprenticed to Balme and Co. After marrying Annie, he took over the running of the hotel and resided there until his death.

He was a member of the Murchison County Council for six years and sat on several boards.  It was Len who built a more modern hotel on the present site.

In 1925, he applied for the removal of the licence from the old hotel to the new one which was northward of the old, a distance of about 300 yards.

In 1930 a workman, Eric Rodley had been staying at the hotel while carrying out some plumbing work.

One night he went to bed and the following morning was found dead outside underneath the window to his upstairs room.

Those investigating surmised that as there had been an earthquake the night he died, Rodley, when trying to get out of his room, must have mistaken the window for a door.

Years came and went and the licence for the hotel changed many times.

The old hotel, with its quaint old English gabled roof, held many memories of the old-time wagoning days, when all goods and produce coming into the district was carted by wagons and six-horse teams from Kohatu Station, the Owen Hotel being a stopping place on a long, weary journey.