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Settlement, 1853–78
These organizations, activities and appointments spread a veneer of civilization over the harshness of frontier life. To them were added cultural high-lights such as lectures by Wills and Alfred Saunders and on one occasion eighty people attended a highly entertaining science demonstration by Professor A. W. Bickerton, recently arrived in Christchurch to help establish Canterbury College. The last included ‘a great number of beautiful and striking experiments’.[1] However, the social life of the majority of the men centred round the four hotels now catering for their demands. The Turtons and Donald Williamson early offended against the not overstringent liquor laws; and much can be gathered from an official report at the end of 1874 that J. W. Oram’s new Somerset Hotel ‘had been conducted better of late’.[2] A second police officer had been appointed in 1873; yet Sergeant Horneman still found his duties too onerous and resigned just as the railway works were approaching the town. Perhaps he feared that the influx of large numbers of railway navvies would greatly add to the problems of law and order, as they had in other construction towns. This threat was apparently not realised. Although Ashburton was much the largest of all those towns in the South Island which arose as a result of railway extension, the floating population at that time did not cause much recorded disturbance.
The Beginning of Larger Farms
The opinion was expressed in 1872 that ‘the Rakaia having so long formed a complete barrier to agricultural settlement, has given the squatters ample time to secure large blocks of their land’ and that the best hope for the speedy development of farming was that the runholders should be ‘willing to let their purchased land at a nominal rental for cropping’.[3] Share cropping did become a feature of the farming methods of the late 1870s, but, in spite of the opportunities given to the men in possession, the greater part of the Ashburton district was secured by outsiders direct from the Crown. When the above opinion was expressed a relatively small part of the plains had been made freehold—about 100,000 acres altogether. Land sales began to assume sizable proportions in 1873 when 60,000 acres were sold. At every meeting of the Land Board it seemed that the purchases in the Ashburton area constituted half the total for the province.
The Longbeach region was the first sold. Although Grigg and