Why is this place significant?

Why is this place Category 1 / Category 2?

The spectacular arid harsh area of Central Otago, blisteringly hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter, with its rocky outcrops and tussock covered ranges, was an area of food gathering (including moa processing), and silcrete quarry sites for Maori. The Manuherikia River runs close by Ophir. Its name recalls the catching of birds. It is traditionally known that moa were hunted in the many subsidiary valleys and catchments by Waitaha. The later arrivals Kati Mamoe and Kai Tahu are known to have hunted weka and many other waterfowl on the Maniatoto and other Central Otago catchments. They also spent much time fishing for tuna (eel). The town of Ophir, known as Blacks No. 1 in its early pastoral days, sits in the spectacular rocky arid back country close to the Manuherikia River. Gold was discovered in the area in 1862 on Charles and William Black’s sheep station. The settlement had its heyday in the bustling gold mining period in the mid to late nineteenth century. Provincial superintendent James Macandrew renamed the town in 1872 recalling the Biblical Ophir from where gold was brought to the Temple at Jerusalem when it was being built by King Solomon. The township flourished with Swindon Street becoming home to a cluster of businesses and government buildings. In the late nineteenth century, Otago and Southland were unique from the rest of New Zealand as the only regions where the Church of England was not the major denomination. Anglicans made up forty per cent of the population nationwide in the colonial era but in Otago and Southland they represented only 25 percent. The south was the stronghold of Presbyterianism and this was even more so in rural areas. The town of Ophir reflected this trend. In the 1860s and 1870s Presbyterian services were held in the Black Schoolhouse. The town was served by the minister from Alexandra. Alexander Ross, the minister in 1868, had a huge district to cover, and Blacks was outside even that charge, but visited the town anyway. There were discussions as early as 1890 about the possibility of a church at Blacks (the name for the town the locals staunchly hung on to), though a decision was deferred pending the securing of a site. Rev Gellie oversaw the Lauder charge in the Dunstan parish, under which Ophir fell. Gellie had been working in the district for the previous few months. The minister Reverend Gellie and his parishioners rallied round the call for a permanent place of worship in Ophir. They formed a building committee in 1895, made up of Gellie, John McKnight Joseph Hay as Chair. The congregation made an application to the Dunstan Presbytery for ‘sanction of grant’ for a new church which the committee was ‘taking steps to erect immediately.’ The Presbytery visited the site and requested that the committee get plans and specifications drawn up and forwarded to the presbytery. Subscription lists were sent out to canvas the district for funds and this was followed by a church bazaar organized by the ladies of Cromwell, Clyde, Alexandra, Becks, and Cambrians, raising £65 (without the benefit of a raffle, which was not permitted). The Church was under construction by March 1897. The Otago Witness reported that the Church ‘now being built here’ was to be opened on 14 March. ‘The building is a neatly-designed one, and will be an ornament to the town.’ A photograph from 1926 shows a single gable building with a belfry mounted on the peak of the gable of the nave. There is a small entrance porch on the street elevation. The Church is weatherboard with a corrugated iron roof. There are decorative barge boards and finials at the gable ends. The vestry is in a gabled addition to the rear elevation. There are three Lancet windows along the have and one on the gable end of the porch. A picket fence with St Andrew’s cross on the gate runs along the verge of the section to Swindon Street. Reverend Alexander Don, a Presbyterian missionary and minister, retired to Ophir in 1926. He agitated for the addition of a vestry, and in 1931 one was built on the rear elevation of the building, ‘furnished so as to serve for the junior department of the Sunday School.’ Don was a significant figure in the Presbyterian Church of Otago. Don’s writings about the Chinese in Otago are a unique and unmatched record. To the Presbyterian Church as a whole Don was a fund-raiser and organiser, an author of church history. He was widely supported by European Presbyterians. He was missionary to the Chinese gold seekers in Otago and had close links with China, despite his uncompromising attitude towards his Chinese congregation. On his retirement to Ophir he remained active in the church and wrote Memories of the golden road, a history of the Presbyterian Church in Central Otago. In 1984 St Andrew’s became part of the Alexandra Clyde Lauder Union Parish, a union of Presbyterian, Methodist and Church of Christ denominations. A diminishing congregation led to the decline of church attendance. In May 2009 the congregation met to consider whether St Andrew’s Church should be closed and sold. The Otago Foundation Board of Property sold St Andrew’s in 2009. In 2012 the owners have opened the building as a collectibles shop.

Setting The former St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church is on the main street of the small Central Otago settlement of Ophir. The main street is characterised by a loose, scattered mix of nineteenth century commercial, government and residential buildings. Residential buildings and commercial buildings are all small in scale – single storey and diminutive. The church sits a little back from the street on an open grassed section. A new residence has been built set back from the rear of the church. There are new plantings and a new picket fence (designed to reference a picket fence in early photographs) at the front of the building. The Church St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church (Former) is of architectural significance as a representative example of a typical, small, rural Gothic-style church. Early photographs of the building show a simple weather board church with a small single gabled porch, and a slightly larger vestry to the rear. A belfry is mounted on the front gable end of the nave. There are finials on the gable ends. The roof is corrugated iron. The church was stuccoed after 1931 and the belfry and finial detailing removed. The form of the building remains the same – porch, nave and vestry. There are three evenly spaced Lancet windows down the length of the nave. There is a matching window in the porch. The windows in the vestry look to be casement windows. All window joinery is timber. The interior of the nave is match-lined with tongue and groove timber. The roof trusses are scissor trusses. The pulpit is still in situ. The doors are heavy timber with diagonal timbers. The porch is also match-lined. The vestry, a later addition, is lined with board and batten.

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A fully referenced registration report is available from the Otago/Southland Office of the NZHPT. Please note that entry on the New Zealand Heritage List/Rarangi Korero identifies only the heritage values of the property concerned, and should not be construed as advice on the state of the property, or as a comment of its soundness or safety, including in regard to earthquake risk, safety in the event of fire, or insanitary conditions.