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out of the Mount Harding estate and on 24 June 1878 held a successful sale of quarter and one-fifth acre town sections, as well as suburban lots of from one to three acres, in ‘the township of Methven’, which they declared was ‘certain to become a thriving and important town’. William Morgan and Charles Hibbs, who were generally regarded as the founders of the township, bought some of these sections and arrived at Methven at the beginning of the following year with all the materials for their first shop, which they soon opened as ‘butchers, bakers, drapers and general storekeepers’.

The Mount Hutt history from which the above quotations are taken states that John Grigg owned a ‘Tin Hut’ near by, used to accommodate drovers on their way with cattle to the West Coast, and that he, too, subdivided 200 acres of land into town and suburban sections. This land was acquired from the Crown in Thomas Russell’s name in 1874 and 1876, and was the only purchase by the partners in this district. They probably took up the land because of the hut or because, being at the junction of six roads, it promised to become valuable. It may have been only a coincidence that the company chose the site for its railway terminus. At any rate, they sold sections to sixteen purchasers during 1882 and 1883 and in the upshot’? the greater part of the township—that part south of the Alford Forest Road—was built on Russell’s land.

Methven was sometimes called ‘the Highland village’ because the neighbourhood contained so many Scottish farmers and workingmen. Quite early it gained a bad name for riotous behaviour especially at harvest time. After a particularly colourful election night incident in 1890 it was said that ‘Methven was a place with a reputation for rough and tumbles when a constable interfered with a fight, and where it was not considered anything out of the way to maul a man in police uniform when he had interfered to stop a breach of the peace.’⁸⁰ But such incidents were rare enough in the usually quiet township. It grew slowly, the population reaching 300 in 1902. But the saleyards were often busy—S53,000 sheep were penned during the year 1897-8. The highest number of sheep trucked at the railway station was 38,600 sent out in the following year, 1898-9. Only some sixty people a week left by train.

The Rakaia people had moved too soon. In 1878, Sir George Grey’s government put forward and Parliament accepted the most