Fountaine was working on a farm near Waipukurau in 1872, a year after coming to New Zealand, when he heard about a new town that had been laid out around a timber camp by the Tararua Range. Fountaine saw opportunity in the growing town, which sat at the junction of the 70 and 40-mile roads. “Like many others, he believed Woodville would eventually be one of the most important inland towns of New Zealand,” McCool said. It was a promising future that never quite panned out. The town was ideally placed for a confluence of the expanding road and rail networks of the central North Island and east coast, and surrounded by good farmland in the Tararua hinterlands.