Standing behind the Waitaki Hotel, the Stone Outbuiiding, probably built in the early 1880s in association with Goddard’s Railway Hotel, is a remnant of the structures associated with this well-known Kurow business. The building has historic significance.

Kurow grew up around the railway in the upper Waitaki Valley in North Otago in the 1870s. The town was surveyed in 1880. A cluster of businesses opened to service the surrounding farms and rail head. Kurow township was surveyed in 1880 and town sections offered for sale soon after. There were already some buildings in the town shown on the survey, including a hotel on the corner of Main and Bridge streets. The early history of hotels in Kurow is somewhat confusing – with buildings burning down, licensees changing and taking licences to different buildings but with the same business name. The Stone Outbuilding seems to be associated with William Goddard and his Bridge Hotel. Goddard’s was not the first Bridge Hotel: Mason’s Bridge Hotel, for example, burnt down in March 1880. Whether on the same or a different site, William Goddard purchased the Bridge Hotel occupied by Mr Rickards in November 1880.

Yorkshire-born William Goddard came to New Zealand, setting up a mail and coaching business between Palmerston and Oamaru prior to the establishment of the rail link. After a serious coaching accident in which two of his passengers were killed and Goddard was seriously injured, he bought the A.A. Smith’s Duntroon-Omarama coach business. When the rail terminus reached Kurow, Goddard shifted there, entering into a partnership with Bernard Delargy in the Bridge Hotel. He later ran the Kurow Hotel and the Hakataramea Hotel. Goddard died in 1917.

The 1880 survey does not show any buildings on Sections 3 and 4 on Station Street (renamed Liverpool Street). The first title to the land was issued to William Goddard in 1883, but Goddard seems to have been occupying the land before then. In March 1881, William Goddard approached the Waste Lands Board to purchase Sections 3 and 4, Block XIII on which ‘a stable is erected.’ This was Goddard’s ‘livery and bait stables’ advertised in 1881. The Board informed Goddard that he could only purchase the land at auction. This small stone outbuilding appears to have been an outbuilding built in association with the former Bridge Hotel in Kurow. It is a single storey, single-gabled stone building, rectangular in plan, with a corrugated iron roof. It has two doors on the north elevation, and a small window on the rear elevation. A former licensee considered that one of the rooms may have been used as meat store as there was a metal rail and a work bench in that room. Little else is known about the building’s history.

William Goddard and Bernard Delargy dissolved their partnership in the Bridge Hotel early 1884 and offered the business for sale. The sale notice for the hotel property (putting the buildings on the current land parcel) describes it as ‘just new, and built on the plan most conducive to elegance and comfort.’ As well as the family apartments, the Bridge Hotel contained 13 public rooms, with ‘Stables, Coach-house and all other requisite appurtenances.’ The business was later renamed the Railway Hotel, because of its proximity to Kurow Railway Station (opened 1878), and carried on the chequered history – burnt down yet again in the 1930s, replaced with the Waitaki Hotel. In 2017, the building remains an outbuilding at the rear of the Waitaki Hotel.