Early Days
Cornish miner James Snell arrived in Kawau in 1854 and bought Snells Beach. The beach had been known as Long Beach. Dalmatian immigrants would live in tents on the beach and dig for Kauri gum when the tide was out. Maori called the southern adjacent Algies Bay ‘Horahora wai’ meaning encroaching waters. Scottish immigrant Alexander Algie and wife Mina, nee Deerness, bought the land further south near Martins Bay, where his brother Samuel had settled in 1867. The family had a boarding house on the beach during the late 1890s but it had closed by 1941. A metal road was built along the eastern peninsular in the 1930s.