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Ashburton’,^[1] but apparently there was no demand. In that year, too, the Provincial Council voted £200 for a road to the ‘shipping place’ at Ashburton.) William Turton bought twenty acres along the river bank at the mouth of the Ashburton in 1859, and two years later J. C. Wilson acquired 75½ acres alongside the ferry reserve on the Rangitata. Nevertheless, in spite of these few attempts to secure some advantage from future improvements in communications, nearly all the earliest purchases—from 1857—were of twenty acre sections in Alford Forest, the main source of timber in the district.

There was little or no clearly defined gridironing among the earliest purchases. But near the mouth of the Rakaia, the Rhodes brothers who first took up one of the runs later transferred to Chapman, purchased sixteen twenty acre sections along the river bank on 17 August 1861. Fourteen of these were spaced at intervals of half a mile to leave 130 to 140 acres between each pair. This arrangement would suggest that scattered freehold sections gave the purchaser control over the surrounding countryside until the surveyor did his work. In fact the intervening sections were bought, half by Fleming brothers and half by Matthew Holmes, in May 1864 at the time that the surveys were undertaken. The extensive gridironing on Lagmhor, Westerfield and Springfield was not carried out until 1866 and later.

Large land purchases were rare. None took place between the Ashburton and Rangitata rivers while land in that area could be bought from the New Zealand Government at 10s an acre. It was north of the Waipara River that the first great Canterbury freehold estates such as Glenmark were built up before that region belonged to the province and came under the Wakefield high-price system.

The first large section in the Ashburton region was of 900 acres, bought for the Duke of Manchester on 23 June 1862—Tinwald now lies on part of it. Several of the duke’s relations were among the earliest Canterbury colonists, and so this purchase may have been intended for settlement, not merely as an investment. As well, the duke was closely connected with the colonising of the Feilding area in the North Island; indeed, his name ought to have been given to that town.

The second large block was of 5445 acres, some three miles square, lying almost equally on both sides of the Wakanui Creek as it reached the sea. Moore bought it (24 November 1862) in

1. ↑ Lyttelton Times, 30 May 1860