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estates came under the New Zealand and Australian Land Company when the businesses merged in 1877.

In the 1870s the sheep returns included the names of farmers with a few hundred animals. One of the earliest of these farmers was James Jamieson. As a young man he had met with success on the Victorian goldfields and had returned to Scotland to marry and start a family. He left his wife and four small children behind him when he again set out this time for New Zealand. He arrived in Ashburton from the south in 1864 when there was talk of constructing a railway from Christchurch and a town was on the point of being laid out. In November that year he bought 140 acres on the north bank of the Ashburton River. He returned to Scotland for his family and a supply of farm implements, and by 1865 was established on his own land in a wooden hut separated by two miles of tussock-covered plain from Turton’s accommodation house, at the ford of the Ashburton. He bought another hundred acres the following year and raised some of the first crops of wheat in the area.

Men working on the runs, and especially those engaged in contracting—building fences and shearing and so earning more than the shepherds’ £50 to £60 a year—often put their savings into land. The most easily remembered of such men in the Ashburton area were the brothers, John and Peter Chalmers, who undertook some of the first local roadmaking. They acquired two sections of 200 acres each in September and October 1863. These formed one block, lying immediately outside the south-east boundary of the present borough of Ashburton.

Having this land and not wishing to work it immediately, John Chalmers offered a part of it to a friend, Joseph Hunt, who was to pay the rent by fencing fifty acres. Hunt had been some ten years in Canterbury. He worked first on the famous road from Lyttelton to Sumner. He then farmed at Sumner in a small way, producing butter and eggs for the local market. A venture into grain growing ended badly, the wheat being stolen. He made two moves in search of better conditions but could hardly have been successful, for he accepted Chalmers’s offer. He then visited the area with his son, constructing a cave in a river bank as a first shelter for his family. Soon afterwards his bullock dray carried his wife and four small children to the Ashburton property and he erected a temporary sod hut. He is credited with raising the first crop of oats and wheat in what became Ashburton County; the