Post Office Building

The landmark building with a handsome clock tower and chimes erected 1910. It was Waimate’s third Post Office. The first, built of bush timber in 1870, has been shifted to Mill Road, and is now a dwelling. It had been superseded in 1892 by a brick building – presently in use as the R&R Bookshop. Upstairs over the tellers and postal counters, worked the miracle of Alexander Bell’s telephone exchange. For 84 years telephonists operated an exemplary switch board service. They alerted war, peace, casualty lists, rugby, boxing and racing results.

(From an article in The Waimate Daily Advertiser April 1911.)

A post office was opened at Waimate on 1 July 1863, the first Postmaster being Mr John Manchester. Mr Manchester was connected with the town of Waimate from its birth and was the first postmaster between Oamaru and Timaru. The post office was in the store of Manchester Bros. and about 1866, was transferred to an enlarged house where business was carried out until 1870 when the increase of postal business and the introduction of telegraphic communication by connection with The Great South Road telegraph line necessitated the erection of a departmental building

First there was the picturesque wooden building with its deep angular gables and casement windows, that did service in the 1870s and remains a sound structure to this day thanks to the quality of the timber sawn from the Waimate Bush. This building was moved to its present site in Mill Road and is now a domestic residence.

Then there was a brick structure opened in 1892 – a building as devoid of architectural style as its predecessor was pretentious. On the opening of the new Post Office, this building was converted to retail stores and this use continues to the present day.

The new post office, built in 1910, is one of the very finest buildings in a town noted for already for its presentable public structures. The new edifice presents a massive façade composed of rusticated Oamaru stones and rising in towers at either flank. The clock tower shoots up, block like, to a cupola 50ft above the pavement. The clock faces are 4ft in diameter. It was erected to commemorate the coronation of King George V.

The clock tower was removed and put into storage in 1947 and was then relocated in 1956 to its present location in front of The Waimate District Council Local Government building where it serves as a World War 2 memorial.

The building is no longer used as a post office and houses retail stores.