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Ashburton
hiring a coach to pursue him, he must again have got off scot free, for he was next reported (in 1869) to be starting a business in Melbourne.
Other temporary residents in the vicinity during the 1860s were Dr Hayne and Dr Charles Archer Croft. One wonders what either found to attract him to the place.
A surprising omission from the same trade directory is any reference to the appearance in 1866 of a ‘rather pretentious looking two-storeyed building called “The New Inn”’[1] for which William Turton’s brothers, Thomas and John, obtained a licence. John succeeded William as postmaster. Thus the three Turton brothers were the first to live for any length of time on the site of the future town. They were remembered as excellent hosts but were too easy-going and unbusinesslike to be successful for long. They lost the second public house in 1874.[2]
As late as 1871 a newspaper account of the development of the district ironically dismissed the township as ‘a flourishing place [with] an hotel, a store, and a lock-up’.[3] Though brief the description was not inaccurate. At that time the New Inn was the only hotel; William Turton had opened a store; Sergeant S. E. Horneman had arrived in 1867 to set up a police station and Turton’s old hotel building had been converted by the end of 1870 into a combined post and telegraph office, magistrate’s court and police headquarters. In February 1871, Ashburton was connected to the telegraph system, Charles Doherty becoming operator and line inspector. By then there were also sufficient families in the district to induce Gilbert Mayo, a relative of the Hunts, to open a private boarding school in a large house he built for the purpose. His venture failed, however, because the local people decided about the same time to ask for a government school supported by rates.[4]
In 1873, only two years later, Ashburton was quite perceptibly a village. It had doubled its population within twelve months and with fifty permanent residents was ‘going ahead with Yankee rapidity’.[5] In another year it could claim a population of 200. A matter of greater significance, however, was that by 1873 four men had arrived who were to be among the leading citizens during Ashburton’s first quarter century as a borough. Donald Williamson built the third hotel in 1872. An ‘old timer’ remembered him as ‘encouraging everyone to his house with music and dancing’.[6] Ten years later, he was Ashburton’s third mayor. Dr James Ebenezer Trevor had seen the prospects of development and had