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Somers’. The last two men had been members of the Ashburton Road Board.

Five years later, a second division took place. A strip eight miles wide along the south bank of the Rakaia River from the sea to Cascade Creek in the Rakaia Gorge was taken from the two existing districts and formed into the South Rakaia road district. This separation may well have been caused by a mild reaction among the large landowners in the area against the increasing demands of the Ashburton township. The new board for this district consisted of John Cathcart Wason, chairman, Edward Stafford Coster, Charles Norris Mackie, W. Herbert Alington and D. Gordon Holmes. Wason had bought the lease of Lendon in 1870 and renamed the run Corwar, after his family’s property in South Ayrshire. Big and strong and handsome—William Oakley remembered him as being six foot, six inches tall—he was very much the gentleman, a fact his opponents used against him at election time. Nevertheless he was an expert farmer; he did not build up an overlarge estate, buying only 5000 acres out of the run; and he regarded himself no doubt in a paternalistic way as the champion of the small farmers against his fellow runholders. It was not therefore entirely in a feudal spirit that he laid out, near his homestead, the village of Barrhill, and named it after a township near his Ayrshire home. He gave workmen the chance to own small properties under good conditions, and helped to provide, if he did not largely pay for, school, schoolhouse and church. Barrhill is visited today, unlike similar townships which also flourished only briefly, because of the attractive little church and the trees. The establishment of the church owed perhaps as much to the Mackie and Alington families nearby as to Wason. But Wason planted the trees. By this time his great shelter belts of pines nine feet high could be seen for miles, the only large plantations in the county. (He later claimed that he had planted more trees than anyone else in New Zealand.) Nevertheless the oaks of Barrhill are his true memorial. Over forty years later, after twenty years back in Britain, he still spoke of his trees on the bank of the Rakaia River.

The Coster brothers had held Blackford run since 1865, but at this time were buying land in the Corwar area, where they acquired nearly 8000 acres. E. S. Coster managed the run and farms. The extremely able and energetic John Lewis Coster was the Christchurch manager of the Bank of New Zealand, but made his name