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earliest sections in the district across the usual approach to the Rangitata ford, it appeared that his purchase was part of a shrewd scheme to make a profit by later resale to the government. The exceptionally early fencing of a section was apparently the second stage in the plot. His fence obstructed the Cobb and Co. coaches on their approach to the cutting down the steep bank of the river and the firm appealed to the provincial authorities who handed the problem to the Ashburton board. Wilson’s section adjoined a ferry reserve which offered an alternative route, but board members, having visited the spot, agreed that any road through the reserve would be inconvenient and expensive to make. They suggested certain exchanges of land. This was not at all what Wilson wanted, but he almost met his match in his fellow runholders. They accepted what appeared to be a face-saving offer from him to build an equally good road through the reserve at the price they had estimated for one along the old line through his section. After three years of bickering, during which Wilson revealed no respectable reason for his obstinacy, the board paid him 50 per cent more than they had first offered. More fencing was erected on the run years later, in 1873, for the board then received a most unusual notification from Archibald McColl, last manager of Cracroft, that ‘all traffic will be stopped through all the paddocks in front of Sir Cracroft Wilson’s station’.^[1] In general, road lines in that district were not fenced until 1890.^[2]

The Ashburton Road Board extended the scope of its activities in 1874 by building thirty immigrants’ cottages and three large houses. Some were sited in Ashburton township, others at Hinds, Longbeach, Greenstreet, Wakanui and Rakaia. Immigration was as important as public works in the New Zealand Government’s development scheme, but it was not well managed, and the Canterbury Provincial Government resumed control of its own immigration system. In order to encourage immigrants to take up work on the land where they were most needed, the provincial authorities built depots for them at various places. The one in Ashburton received its first occupants on 24 June 1874, when a special train arrived with 147 adults and children, ‘a very healthy and clean lot of people’^[3] who had travelled to New Zealand on S.S. Atrato perhaps the first vessel to come all the way from England under steam power. Although some of the later immigrants no doubt left the depot for the Road Board’s cottages when they were built, these local houses were not put to much use.