The Eyre Country – sourced from Hawkins’ history of the Waimakariri District. The book’s a great yarn all-round on the old district.
The country away to the west of Kaiapoi was scarcely glanced at by Torlesse and Boys during their survey of the northern agricultural districts in 1849-50, for, on their earlier preliminary traverse, they had found it poor and inhospit able, and they were more concerned with land which would support small farm settlements. This country could be divided roughly into three differing areas – Kaiapoi Island, the heavy swamp land of the lower Eyre, and the barren plain of the upper Eyre – of which only the first and a small portion of the second were pre sumed to be fit for settlement. These were included in the Mandeville Agricultural District.
The lower reaches of the Waimakariri have changed radically since 1850, for at one time the river divided into two equally large branches about seven miles from the coast. The North Branch took a northerly course, changed direction sharply, and rejoined the South Branch again to form an island of about seven thousand acres. This island was covered with swamps but draining it was considered an easy matter, and as it contained some of the most fertile soil in North Canterbury it attracted some of the earliest land purchasers. The township of Kaiapoi grew up at its northern tip, and because it was so accessible to new settlers it was by-passed by prospecting sheep men until 1894. In February of that year a pastoral licence for five thousand acres was issued to William Smith, a Gladstone settler, but Smith disposed of it almost immediately to George Day, captain of the Flirt and Sidey’s tenant in the Kaiapoi Hotel. Day probably allowed part of the run to be used by William Smart, a partner who had a run on the south bank of the South Branch.
Beyond the island the country degenerated rapidly from deep swamp to a parched infertile plain, boulder-strewn and bare. Only lonely cabbage trees pointed to the presence of occasional fertile hollows or the dried-up remains of old watercourses. The surveyors practically ignored the Eyre country, and in addition to the swamps they recorded only two noteworthy features on their maps, one being a long 10,000 to 20,000-acre block of high impenetrable manuka which sprawled along the north bank of the Waimakariri, and the other the dry mouthless scar of the Eyre, the river which gave this country its name. It first appears on early Canterbury Association maps as the Wilberforce Plain but this name was never used locally. Yet in spite of its deficiencies the Eyre country was soon completely occupied by pastoralists and it became one of the most stable and best-run counties in the province.
The more agreeable land adjoining Kaiapoi Island was taken up in two runs in 1852, one by H. C. Young, and the other by Captain James Row, who also acquired Young’s run towards the end of that year and combined the two into one 12,000-acre station which he named Wai-iti. Row, a genial old Cornishman, had been master of the barque Tory, which had made several voyages to Canterbury with sheep and cattle from Australia. Row kept Wai iti until 1860 when he sold it to Charles Hillyard, but apart from the fact that he raised a family of very attractive daughters there is little else one can say about him. After 1860 he continued to live at his original homestead on the Eyre, but it was destroyed by a great grass fire which swept through the Eyre country in 1872. Hillyard built a new homestead further up the Eyre.
Wai-iti contained both good and poor land, but even the worst, which lay to the west, was taken up in the rush for pastoral land prior to 1855. An adjacent sooo-acre block was taken up by Robert Chapman and became part of Springbank in May 1853, and in the same month a 6000-acre block was taken up by Marmaduke Dixon. Dixon’s block contained much manuka, and in July he acquired another run further up the Eyre.
In August 1853, Thomas Kesteven took up 14,500 acres above Dixon, the whole of the poorer Eyre country then being occupied. Chapman sold his block to Hillyard but Dixon and Kesteven persevered and established the Eyrewell and Worlingham stations.
Kesteven, who had owned a cloth warehouse in London with his brothers, named Worlingham after a village near Beccles where his mother was bom. He built the first homestead on the banks of the Waimakariri, but in 1867 he sold the station to Thomas Curtis and retired to Fendalton. Curtis, an American from Massachusetts, was superintendent of the Lyttelton Fire Brigade. He bought the country on the Eyre between Worlingham and Cust from J. T. Murphy, and sold the station to Joseph Pearson of Burnt Hill in 1873. Pearson passed it over to his son William Fisher Pearson and Harry Brettagh, and it was these two who shifted the homestead from the Waimakariri to its present site. In 1890 they disposed of the run to the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Company. About 6500 sheep were shorn annually on Worlingham.
Marmaduke Dixon was born in Caistor, Lincolnshire, in 1828, the third son of James Dixon and grandson of Thomas Dixon, a noted breeder of sheep. Holton Park, the family seat for four hundred years, was situated in the heart of the fen country and the Dixon family had done much towards its drainage and reclamation. Marmaduke was a delicate boy, and as the fens were considered unhealthy for him he was apprenticed to a shipping firm as soon as he had finished at the Caistor Grammar School. His life at sea during the eighteen-forties was as full of adventure as one might expect of those times. On one occasion he was wrecked on the coast of Brazil and had to wait six weeks before being rescued by a clipper ship. During the journey home, and at the risk of flogging, he intervened on behalf of a boy who was being mercilessly whipped, an act which earned him commendation from the ship owners at the expense of an outraged skipper.
Dixon then joined the ship Senator which took him on several voyages to Australia, and on one of these, about 1845, he paid his first visit to New Zealand. The captain nearly persuaded him to buy land at Wellington but he decided against this and rose to the position of first mate on another of his employer’s ships. This position was a difficult one on ships on the Australian run, for in 18SI the rushes to the goldfields were keeping ships in Australian ports without crews to man them. Thanks to Dixon his ship was able to discharge its cargo and sail again with little desertion, a service which his employers repaid with a master’s ticket.
Bishop Selwyn offered Dixon the command of his mission yacht, but he had met an Australian squatter named John Murphy who had taken up a run on the Cust. Murphy described the plains to him, and so sharpened his interest in New Zealand that Dixon took a passage on the Samarang, which arrived in Lyttelton early in 1853. There was still plenty of open pasture left in Canterbury at that time so that the only reason for Dixon’s choice on the Eyre may have been the influence of Murphy, whose run lay on the opposite bank.
Dixon’s first home, a small whare which he built in the manuka near the Waimakariri, was called “The Hermitage’, the name by which his station was first known. He stocked his two blocks with three thousand sheep obtained on terms from Sir John Hall, a fellow-passenger on the Samarang, but he was immediately faced with the problem of watering them. As surface water and springs were non-existent he dug a well single-handed nearly eighty feet down into the shingle, a task which involved a long climb to the top to empty every bucket. As the well became deeper, and the danger of the sides falling in on him greater, he rigged up an apparatus of his own invention which allowed him without leaving the bottom to haul the bucket up and empty it.
However, after all his work he found that he had missed the water-beds. He reluctantly abandoned the well and continued to sledge his water three miles from the Waimakariri.
The old whare, which contained all his books and diaries, was burnt, but after returning from a trip to England which he made in 1859 to marry a Miss Wood, daughter of the Rev. Dr Wood, Woodhall Park, Wensleydale, Yorkshire, he took up residence in a new homestead which he built nearer the Eyre. Here he tapped a reliable water-bearing stratum and the homestead became a regu lar watering place for the bullock teams and wagons of the Oxford settlers. Mrs Dixon named the new homestead Eyrewell.
After his return to Canterbury in 1860 Dixon’s energy and ability made his name a respected one in two important spheres, namely, farming and politics. Because of its soil deficiencies land purchasers made few inroads on Eyrewell, but Dixon had great faith in his manuka and tussock land and while other runholders were merely concerned with their sheep he devoted his life to the improvement of his land to increase its somewhat meagre carrying capacity. The manuka was crushed with rollers and burnt off and the clearings were then sown down in tussock which in turn provided shelter for finer grasses. With the exception of Glenmark, Eyrewell was really the only station in Canterbury to experiment with native tussock. This took many years of hard work, and the manuka was never entirely eradicated, but the run was improved during the nineties by the construction of Dixon’s own irrigation system which used the waters of the Waimakariri.
Among the other progressive steps which he took were the introduction to Canterbury of the three-furrow plough (of which he imported a dozen in 1866), the straw elevator, and the slip-gate for drafting sheep, which he used before most settlers were aware of its existence. It is believed that it was Dixon who first exported Canter bury wheat to England by the bag, and, when the Canterbury Frozen Meat Company was formed, he sent to England its first twenty-five carcasses of Canterbury lamb, five of these going to the Duke of Edinburgh and the remainder to the editors of London newspapers.
Personally Dixon was a stern but unselfish man, and the early fears for his health proved unfounded. He was a great believer in education, and his large library, which contained an astonishing variety of books, overflowed a complete room of his homestead. This library perhaps epitomizes the man, for he had a penchant for a knowledge of all things. It follows that he was far-sighted and he certainly was not a conservative. Perhaps it was the difficulties that he encountered while bringing Eyrewell into production that aligned his sympathy with that of the small freeholder in the chambers of the Provincial Council.
Although a squatter, Dixon has been described as the first Canterbury “liberal” and his record stamps him as being more of a democrát than a conservative. Dixon entered politics through the Rangiora and Mandeville Road Board, being among the first members of that body elected in 1864. He later served on the Eyre district boards and was elected a representative of the Provincial Council for Mandeville in 1865, serving on that body until the abolition of the Provincial Government in 1876. Here he led the North Canterbury members in their fight for a northern railway, for drainage, for irrigation, and for improved roading. Yet because he was to the fore in assisting the small farmers against the strong squatter interest, Dixon was spared the attacks and abuse that were often the lot of his colleagues, such was his reputation for fairness and vision. Here is another picture of the man. Always an advocate of the use of machinery, he suggested that the Government should import some Australian road scoops. This was at a time when roading in Canterbury was in a very poor state, yet the authorities would not agree. He then offered to import them himself and stand any loss. They proved a failure and were left on his hands. Yet this kind of thing often happened and his services to the province left him very much the poorer.
By the middle ‘sixties the country up the Eyre to the west of the Rangiora and Mandeville swamps had acquired the name Mandeville Plains; a handful of scattered land purchasers had started farming the lighter land of these plains by 1867.
Overton’s farm had good land on it, for such pockets as this did occur above the lower Eyre swamps, particularly on the north side of the Eyre between that river and the Cust valley. The earliest of the small farmers to farm this strip were C. F. Burgin, John Horrell, John Winter, and Stephen Sheat.
Burgin came from Lincolnshire and migrated to Canterbury on the Cameo in 1860, and later bought land near Swannanoa. His property, Crosby Farm’, of five hundred acres, was later increased to eleven hundred acres by the purchase of another block called Collier’s Fann on the Ohoka Road, and after his death in 1878 both were farmed by his son, Thomas. Winter, a farm worker from Saltby, Leicestershire, arrived in Lyttelton on the Lancashire Witch in 1863 and settled on a seventy-acre section at Swannanoa two years later. His farm, Milton Grange, like most Eyre farms, was enlarged (to seven hundred acres), for few of the early settlers were able to support themselves on their original selections. The light Eyre country could not be farmed successfully in small blocks.
John Horrell settled to the west of Swannanoa, roughly fifteen miles from Eyreton. Horrell’s father (also John) first farmed land for the Rev. Hole of Wolsery, Devon, but in 1850 he occupied Moore Farm, Morchard Bishop. At this time the family consisted of six sons and four daughters, but John, the eldest, applied for a passage on the Charlotte Jane and sailed for Canterbury with the Pilgrims. After a short stay at Lyttelton he bought land near Papanui, but in 1857 moved to Woodend where he was joined by his brothers James and Edward. There the Horrell brothers worked in the forest, but John was restless and he often made long journeys across the plains with a spade on his back testing the soil as he went. Although the soil around Woodend may have been heavier he found what he wanted near the Eyre, and he moved on to his section in 1863.
This land was part of Murphy’s run, which extended as far as the Eyre. Higgins was disturbed by Horrell’s arrival and he tried to freehold the better land himself, but Horrell wisely chose a block on which scattered rushes were growing – a sign that water, a rare commodity in that country, was seeping up near the surface. This part of the run was known as Ryder’s Flat, for one of Higgins’s shepherds named Ryder lived in a hut there. One of Ryder’s duties was to tend the miserable half-starved dogs which were tied to posts to mark the boundary line and keep sheep from straying across it. To Ryder’s Flat John Horrell gave the name Horrelville, the name by which this locality has been known to this day.
Horrell’s first house at Horrelville was made of sod, and beside it he dug a deep well to tap an underground flow of water which to this day has seldom failed. The land proved itself to be good, and it was soon nourishing a fine orchard from pips and seedlings imported from England. Horrell was also among the first to prove the value of turnips for sheep feed on light land, and, with his sons Harry, Frederick, and Samuel, he carried out extensive experiments in wheat growing and cross-breeding. Two more of John’s brothers, Henry and George, migrated to New Zealand in 1880. Edward had returned to England and a married sister settled at Saltwater Creek.
The neat hawthorn hedges of the Horrellville district, so unlike gorse-divided Canterbury, were planted by Horrell’s friend Stephen Sheat, who bought the seedlings with him when he settled there in 1865. The Sheat family came from Somerset, and had migrated to Nelson in 1853, Stephen Sheat coming overland to Canterbury in 1865. He purchased 299 acres, Somerset Farm, near Horrell soon after his arrival.
Five years passed before any more migrants settled in this part of the Eyre country, but during the years 1869-71 a number, many of them from the troubled land of Northern Ireland, took up free holds between Swannanoa and Horrelville. Among them were two families of Smiths, two Robinsons, and the Dawson, Frizzell, Bennett, McDowell, Pester, McGowan, Bradley, Jordon, Donovan, Maindonald, and Major families. In September 1872 a school was opened for them, the name West Eyreton being given to both school and district.
It is difficult to get a clear picture of the Eyre country as a whole until 1874, when the first detailed census was made. Dixon was the only run-owner on the plains to have his station ignored by frecholders, and he even found himself in the happy position of being able to enlarge it. Eyrewell was included in the Midland Railway Company’s area and in 1894 was sold to Dixon at fifteen shillings an acre to provide the company with an advance payment. This sale included the old Springbank block (84) between Eyrewell and Wai-iti, which Dixon had leased about 1866, and parts of the Burnt Hill and Dagnum stations which Pearson would not freehold.
The eighteen-seventies were undoubtedly a decade of prosperity such as the Eyre farmers had not as yet experienced. Like the farmers of other districts they took advantage of the improvement in the prices of produce, and the Eyreton Road Board encouraged new immigrants to settle there, taking over for this purpose all available unused buildings, including the old ferry buildings on the Waimakariri to house the newcomers until they were permanently settled.
The West Eyreton district, with only 260 settlers and fifty-three holdings, was one of the most sparsely-settled areas between the Waimakariri and the Waipara. Together, however, they had 6812 acres sown down in wheat, or thirty-eight per cent of the wheat acreage north of the Waimakariri, and by far the greatest acreage of all the northern farming districts. Most of this acreage was planted by the croppers of the Swannanoa area, one of whom, Horatio Wood, had previously harvested four hundred acres of wheat – a large sowing in a predominantly mixed farming district.
The rise in prices and the growth of industries along the Ohoka were only two contributory reasons for the more prosperous condition of the settlers. The Mandeville and Rangiora Swamp was at last responding to drainage, and a branch railway was constructed from Kaiapoi through Ohoka and Horrelville to Oxford, a line which the Eyre settlers were particularly lucky in possessing. The story of this line is told elsewhere, but in summary it may be said that the line was laid down in the face of opposition from the Rangiora and Cust areas and in spite of the fact that another Oxford branch line had been commenced from Rangiora.
There was much evidence that the Eyre line was not warranted, but Government money was being freely distributed for this purpose and on the strength of recommendations by the Hon. J. T. Peacock, and because most of the Eyre was still under-developed, a line was constructed.
Although remnants of this old swamp still exist, most of the Flaxton, Ohoka, and Eyreton areas were freed from permanent surface water by the eighteen-seventies, and during this decade the isolation of the West Eyreton district was broken down by the new railway.
In terms of figures the position was this: between 1874 and 1881 the population of the Lower Eyre district rose by 293 to 1640, while that of the West Eyreton district rose by 125 to 385. These figures demonstrate no extensive spread of land settlement, for apart from the richer fringe along the North Branch the capacity of the remainder of the land was strictly limited. This is proved by the fact that the population increased by only twenty six per cent during the years when conditions were most favourable for expansion, and that after 1881 it actually declined.
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A new farm at West Eyreton was John Addinell’s Stonycroft, a 662-acre block which Addinell began farming in 1878. Born in London, Addinell first migrated to Nelson in 1861, and was at Waimate for twelve years before coming to the Eyre.
From 1880 to 1900 the population of the Eyre country remained fairly static although there was a slight decline in the early ‘eighties following the collapse of the grain and produce markets and the closing down of the flax mills. This migration was only temporary, however, for by 1890 the Eyreton area population had risen to 1660 and that of West Eyreton to 382. Most of the settlers were still widely scattered, and Ohoka became their only township, its location on the railway preventing Flaxton from attaining to that distinction.
The other settlements, Clarkville, Eyreton, Swannanoa, Mande ville, West Eyreton, and Horrellville became sign-post localities, the centres of which were the churches and schools which were built out on the open plain at convenient crossroads. At one time West Eyreton boasted a post office and a blacksmith’s shop. The former was opened in one of the railway houses in 1878 while the smithy and an implement-making shop were established there in 1887 by George Martin, an old Woodend and Hororata settler
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Walter and Arthur Chapman, sons of Robert Chapman of Springbank, and their farms date from the subdivision of the station after the old shagroon’s death in 1882. These sons shared the Eyre part of the station, Arthur the 3500-acre Northwood estate at Swannanoa, and Walter 3680 acres at West Eyreton which he named The Ranche. Another 3700-acre block, Lowland Leas, nearer Springbank, was inherited by Robert William Chapman. The three Chapmans built fine homesteads on their properties, planted great shelter belts as a protection against the unfettered winds on the plain, and became successful breeders and sheepmen. Their plantations became favourite picnic spots for local children who were brought up in country barren of any natural pleasure grounds, and the Lowland Leas woolshed became the scene of gay harvest-home balls which the Chapmans put on for the local settlers every year.
The Swannanoa estate during the eighties was in the hands of Francis Kelly, an Irishman from County Cavan, for Brown had long since returned to America, where he died in 1895. The Shepherd family kept the post office and there was also a church and a school. In addition to the Swannanoa families already mentioned there were a number of later arrivals, the Grant, Ward, Ronan, Atkinson, Daly, and Hyde families. The population of the settlement in 1901 was one hundred.
The younger Marmaduke Dixon died in 1918, and Eyrewell was taken over by his trustees. Blocks of it were later sold off, a part was divided up among members of the family, and the 15,000 sheep which grazed this country in 1910 were reduced to a mere 5ooo.
Dixon dropped out of politics after the abolition of the provinces, but he retained his interest in public bodies, and assisted financially and actively in the founding and patronage of every Eyre society and institution. Eyrewell still contained about 48,000 acres by 1890, and as he grew older Dixon’s time was devoted more to the improving of his station. His eldest son, also Marmaduke, had left Christ’s College to assist him, and after a great struggle with the road boards they pioneered the irrigation of the thirsty upper Eyre country.*
Marmaduke Dixon senior died in 1895 at the age of sixty-seven but his son carried on and in 1904 added to Eyrewell the Waimakariri part of Worlingham which he bought from Major P. Johnson. The homestead and Eyre country of Worlingham were bought by J. F. Tipping of Cust. In 1907 Dixon also acquired this, with the exception of the homestead and a small block which Tipping sold to Thomas Izard. Another son of Marmaduke senior, Richard Dixon, bought the last remaining 2330 acres of Wai-iti for £17,600 in 1927. In 1900 Peacock still had 3000 sheep on his station, which was then managed by Alfred Loe. Peacock died soon afterwards, and until finally disposed of by his trustees in 1907-8 the property was managed by his step-son, J. A. McRae Peacock.
The younger Marmaduke Dixon, who was born in 1862, was as remarkable a man as his father, and was, in his own hobby, also a pioncer. In 1885, with G. E. Mannering, a son of Mannering of Birch Hill and Fernside, he made his first snow ascent – of Mount Torlesse – and from that day was obsessed with an ambition to climb Mount Cook, which was then still virgin. Between 1886 and 1890 they undertook four expeditions into the Tasman valley to attack the mountain with primitive equipment – much of it made at Eyrewell and still treasured there – only to be beaten back by fog, snowdrifts, and sickness. On their last attempt, in January 1890, they almost succeeded in making the first ascent of Cook, but evening closed in and robbed them of their goal when they were within 140 feet of the summit. Both Dixon and Mannering had already negotiated the Waimakariri from the Bealey by canoe the previous year, so they consoled themselves with a 132-mile dash down the Waitaki. The following year, 1891, Dixon, with A. P. Harper,f became a co-founder of the New Zealand Alpine Club.
For full details of Dixon’s irrigation scheme, see “Farming’. † Died 1955