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of the countryside, was the addition to the total number of sheep owners—from 206 to 764. The growth is even more sharply defined by the figures for flocks of under 500 sheep, which increased from 97 to 455. The average size of flocks had been more than halved. These changes had been brought about by the sale of many farms out of the estates both privately and through government purchase and subdivision.

Government land settlement in the Ashburton County went through three separate phases during this period to 1902. First came the formation of village settlements, then the disposal of poorer land on easy conditions, and finally the establishment of Highbank, Marawiti and Hekeao settlements under the Liberal Party’s land scheme.

In 1880 when William Rolleston was Minister of Lands he inaugurated a system whereby men could obtain land from the State under easy conditions. The first true village settlements were part of this scheme. They provided sections of from one to six acres each on which men could establish homes while they maintained themselves by working in the neighbourhood. Only two of these villages were of any size—those in the vicinity of Rakaia and Temuka.

The Rakaia settlement was the first in that neighbourhood, though it has often been confused with the immigration cottages built by the Road Board in 1874. It was apparently the later, 1880, settlement which became known as ‘Sod Town’, because of the whitewashed earth houses built by the settlers. These houses were comfortable, neat and strongly built. From Rakaia, a mile away, they looked like beehives. By the end of the century practically all the sections in the settlements of this time had been made freehold. In 1905 C. A. C. Hardy told a land commission that this settlement was ‘probably the finest in New Zealand’. It was, according to a later comment ‘a monument to Rolleston’s memory’ having borne out ‘his most optimistic predictions’.^[1] The thirty or so settlers were said to be ‘prosperous’.

In 1886 largely under a new scheme several reserves in the county were cut up and leased to working men. Three reserves at Chertsey provided some thirty-two sections of from five to twenty acres. The sections on two separate settlements at Dromore were

1. ↑ Ibid 14 Apr. 1905, 9 Jan. 1914