For years Doris Buick yearned to see an information panel erected where the village of Staveley once stood to ensure the names and faces of the past are not forgotten.

 Just before Christmas she got her wish, when she, long time resident Alan Totty, the Department of Conservation and the Ashburton District Council joined forces to erect an information board that unveils the Staveley of yesteryear.

 Her family, the Goldsmiths, were one of the early settlers in the area, with her grandfather George establishing the first blacksmith shop in 1886.

 His sons continued the family tradition, some as blacksmiths and others as wheelwrights, until 1940 when horses had long been replaced by trucks and tractors on farms.

 Not only has the blacksmith shop disappeared, so too have dozens of houses, dozens of families and the memories they held of a town that time has almost erased.

 Mrs Buick recalled a village that housed several businesses, many houses and remembered Staveley as a very social place.

 “I also remember the bush, it came right down to the village then. All the little villages around, they all had their own life,” Mrs Buick said.

 School meant a walk from Staveley to Springburn, but back then that wasn’t considered a hardship, rather it was the way most people got about, if you wanted to go anywhere, you used your feet.

 Mrs Buick was lucky, she was allowed to attend secondary school, travelling to Ashburton by bus each day, one and a half hours each way.

 On Wednesdays, for some reason the bus was always delayed and that meant the unaccustomed luxury of sixpence worth of fish and chips for tea.

 It also carried the penalty of having to do her homework in town and not arriving home until after 9pm.

 While today’s teenagers might look at her life and think it was tough, that’s not how Mrs Buick remembered it.

 “Looking back I think in a way they were the best days. You learned to work for your money and life was simple and uncomplicated. If you couldn’t pay for it, you went without.”

 She planned to become a nurse when she left school, but a bout of sickness saw the family doctor suggest she would not be robust enough for the work.

 “I decided I’d go dental nursing, but the war meant they cancelled the intake and I went on the list for the following year. When you were 18 or 19 then, if you weren’t in essential work you were manpowered on to farms so I thought I’d better hurry up and get an ‘essential’ job,” she said.

 The Springburn Post Office was looking for a worker and she grabbed the job.

 “They did everything back then, I even married a couple of people and I registered plenty of births. They were very interesting years, particularly during the war when I had to deliver some bad telegrams, at night on shingle roads in the dark, usually bawling my eyes out because we knew the families involved and I’d gone to school with a lot of them.”

 For all of that she earned 10 shillings a week (about $1), less money charged by the postmaster for board.

 “They were long hours and if a telegram came in you had to deliver it, it didn’t matter what time it was.”

 After many decades, when she looked at the names on mail boxes on roads that were still familiar she struggled to recognise one.

 The old families have all gone.

 As the years ticked by and the old names, the old families from Staveley moved away, Mrs Buick had a niggling feeling that unless the township’s history was recorded in some way, it could be lost forever.

 “I’m the only Goldsmith left and there are no other connections with the area.

 “All the little settlements have disappeared. A lot has been lost in New Zealand because these rural settlements have gone,” she said shortly before her death.

 A visit from relatives in England and a trip to Staveley confirmed the need to make sure the stories of the past were not lost.

 “They were intrigued and gave me the nudge to do something because once the last of my generation goes there will be no one with the interest or the knowledge to do this.”

 The information board, detailing Staveley’s history from the mid 1870s, was compiled by Alan Totty with input from Mrs Buick and was unveiled just before Christmas.

 It was funded by the Goldsmith family and the Ashburton District Council.

 “I was absolutely delighted to see this. It was really starting to worry me. I heaved such a sigh of relief when I knew the plaque had arrived. There needs to be one of these in all the little settlements.

 “It relies on my generation to do this because people forget very quickly and there are so many new people in rural areas now.”

Pictured top: Descendants of one of Staveley’s earliest family, the Goldsmiths, with a newly erected information board outlining the Staveley settlement’s history. From left: Amelia Buick, Anne Finch, Lorraine Slattery and Tina Buick with Doris Buick.