YESTERDAY, A MARSH; TO-DAY, A TOWN; TO-MORROW, A CITY

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 94, 7 May 1937, Page 31 (Supplement)

YESTERDAY, A MARSH; TO-DAY, A TOWN; TO-MORROW, A CITY

■ \ Vision and Fulfilment; The Story oi Hastings OVER FIFTY YEARS AS A BOROUGH Yesterday a lonely marsk, widespread, where wild liie abounded ; to-day, a thriving town set in the midst oi a proliiic agriculture il and pastoral district; and to-morrow — who knows? — a veritable city oi ihe plains to whose inhabitants we and oar age may seem as remote as the tumbling timber houses, the ill-lit, unpaved streets, the lack oi amenity, the Aowing beards, the rigid collars, corseted stiifness and slower tempos oi yesteryear seem to as. That is the Hastings whose golden jubilee as a borough we are about to celebrate. The story oi Hastings is largely one oi vision and iu\(ilment;oi healthy growth and sound delevop - ment It began so short a time ago that there are still men active among us who can , if you ask them, say, "Yes, I remember " and conjure up ior you the early chapters: the few straggling houses about which the borough has developed; the purchase oi Hastings, and the vast area oi plain about it, ior prices in some instances ranging irom 30 shillings an acre; the names — they are almost fabled now — oi the "Twelve Apostles" who bought them; the cbming oi the railway ; and names and events which are pre - served to this generation Pnly in street names -

. If from a point of vantage at. Te Mata Peak you were to survey tfie vista of English-looking countryside, t\e pattern of fields and tree-bordered roads, and the clusters of houses edged about by well-developed farmlands, you would accept it literaUy. for what it is, with barely a thought for what it was; but it is the. eomparison of then and now that gives one the perspoetive upon a halfcentury of rapid but well-founded development. Hastings was given the status of a borough in 1886, just.a little over fifty years ago. There were then 1500 people here ; in the meantime ite population has grown more than tenfold and its commerce — well, wbo shall say how much? Wise leadership has set the borough upon its path .of high destiny; shrewd judgment has developed the hinterland from which it draws its commerce — the sheep and dairy lands, the orchards. Not very long before the conferment of the status of a borough, what are urban areas now could not find buyers at £3 and £4 an ftcre, so unpromising did the outlook seem. Then came the railway, and so the foundation of the township was laid. Not even then did^the residents set a very high value upon land in the town section. A report of the first auction sale of township lots records that realisations averaged £56 an acre. That was in 1873. At March 31, 1936, the unimproved value of the borough had grown to £1,380,524; the capital value was £3,786,611. The ydde, straight, even-surfaced streets of modern Hastings, running between well-stocked, brightly-illuminated shopfronts, can still to the older members. of the "community evoke a memory of dustyv uiiinetaned- roadways- and candle-lit shpps;. the smooth pas•age of the modern streamlined motor-car over borough roads can

still contrast with the bumpy passage of shambling horses drawing cabs and carriages; and electrical ly-lit streets can still recall, even to a younger generation, the days of gas-lamps. But change, when one changes with it, is barely perceptible. One takes the thriving importance of present-day Hastings for granted. If one wants to gauge the degree of the town's development one must turn back the pages to the strenuous and simple days when in Hawke's Bay roads were mere tracks, when there was no railway, when it took a day's long journey by coaeh to travel from Waipukurau to Hastings, when rivers had to be forded ' for want of bridges, when kerosene and candles were the only artificial means of illumination, when there was 110 such thing as the science of refrigeration, no wireless, no telephones, motor-cars or any of the mechanical devices of this generation, and so few of the amenities that every-day use leads us nowadays to take for granted. Civic development since then has given us all that a prosperous community could wish for: wide streets serve the traffic in the town; good roads conneet Hastings and its hinterland; we have highly-developed . services. All this has been encompassed within easy memory of people still living ih vigorous maturity. The town has suffered the ravages of.fire and recovered; it has been wrecked by earthquake. and still it has recovered. Its story is one of civic and business enterprise,' of commercial strength and ' vision. And this is the story that will be continued f?.r into the future. Who shall be called too'much of a visionary who says: "To-morrow a city"?