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Meet our community

150th Celebrations

A dynamic little town of 450 people, Lawrence has always reached for the gold in many ways. Through a mixture of fundraising and utilising skills held by town residents and the farming families in the surrounding region, the community has successfully completed a variety of large projects, often at no cost to the ratepayer.

Leading the way

Lawrence has always had a fair share of good leaders going right back to the gold mining era of the early 1860s. There were a lot of strong personalities and good leadership amongst the early goldminers and traders who arrived to seek their fortune following Gabriel Read’s gold strike.

There were people like John Joseph Woods who wrote the score of the national anthem. John Stenhouse was another – he was headmaster at the school for 46 years and gave the pupils a solid grounding in education and life skills. By the turn-of-the-century Stenhouse had pupils in most government departments in Wellington. The Lawrence area has produced three High Court judges and two commissioners of police.

Today, Lawrence has a strong farming community who are very supportive of new initiatives within the town.

A strong ethos within the community that there are no barriers to achieving their goals have resulted in some remarkable success stories.