Ashurst Notes

Feilding Star, Volume XII, Issue 136, 9 May 1891, Page 2

Ashurst Notes

[OUR OWN COKRKSPONDENT."j La grippe has returned to Ashurst. Many of our townspeople suffered with it on its former visitation. They tell us it is the ghost of John Chinaman. You remember that terrible flood in China caused by the bursting of the banks of the H'oang-ho, when people were drowned by tens of thousands, and then silted up with the debris. A fine dust rises in the air from this, and is carried by the winds across Europe, and so produces la grippe. We may legislate and keep John Chinaman, (in the flesh) from our shores, but this is beyond us. Mr Holly, one of the original selectors at our end of the Harbour Board Block, has sold his farm, and I hear is coming to reside in Ashurst. He has made a very nice place up there. Some of the prettiest views imaginable are to be obtained from the clifln near his place. The timber ordered for the Spur Road school has been delivered this week. There is a good solid road from the Victoria Mili to the school site and metalled, yet it takes a 5 horse team to draw 1100 feet of timber. The road is rightly named, and the steep grades necessary to get up this spur have made it a very hard road to travel. When a man rides 14 miles and rises at an unearthly hour to do it, and then walks aboxit all day with a gun which he does not fire off — is that man ft sportsman? Such is pigeon shooting in soms places near here. I hear that those settlers on the Awahou-Foxton Block, who are behind hand with their improvements, are told that they must make them this year, consequent y there will be quite a large area of bush thrown down on that block ; also on this — the west side of the Pohangina, there is great activity in the bushfelling line, and hundreds of acres are now let. Three years ago this part of the country was almost a terra incognita ; now the fame of Pohangina Valley, as being a good grazing district, has spread far and wide. A Christchurch farmer, who has been staying here, remarked that the Manawatu will be the best grazing land of the future, and will carry nearly double the amount of stock per acre that the South Island can. I hear that Mr G. M. Snelson, auctioneer of Palmerston, is about to start auction sales of produce, &c, here every Friday.