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1920: 1923 - Lloyd Road

Lloyd Road was first established in 1923 and named after one of Lake Country’s most travelled pioneers, John Lloyd. John was the eldest of ten children of John Lloyd Sr. and Margaret Hammer Lloyd of Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire, North Wales.

At a young age John Lloyd sailed to Melbourne, Australia, where he mined for six years at Coolgardie, then later farmed in the Melbourne and Brisbane areas.

Sometime later he sailed on to New Zealand where John was given the appointment of secretary of the first Small Farm Association and was put in charge of forty strong and healthy pioneers from Yorkshire, England. He, along with these pioneers, cleared the land for the settlement known as “Forty Mile Bush”.

In 1873 John Lloyd married Hannah Collins, an Australian, and on March 14, 1875 John and Hannah were proud parents of the first white child, Miriam Lucy Lloyd, to be born in the Hawkes Bay area.

In 1897 John set sail for America, leaving behind Hannah and two of his children, Margaret & James. John lived for a time in both Iowa and Tennessee. It was in 1902 that Dick and Amos, two of John’s children, travelled to the Okanagan in search of good farmland and stayed at the O’Keefe Ranch for a while.

John Lloyd arrived in Oyama and set up a ranch above the Irvines where they had a cabin above Mission Road. The Lloyd family were involved with logging and farming and had a good relationship with the local Indians who helped with the harvest in return for all the potatoes they wanted. Around 1908 John Lloyd decided it was time to take life easy and passed most of the work over to his family.

Source: Young, Joyce. The Calendar, February 8, 1995.