MASTERTON’S BIRTHDAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 May 1938, Page 8

MASTERTON’S BIRTHDAY

AND SOME REFLECTIONS THEREON. (To the Editor.) Sir,— Saturday last, May 21, was the 84th anniversary of Masterton settlement under conditions laid down by the sponsors of the Wairarapa Small Farm Settlement scheme. To that small but intrepid band of worthy pioneer personages who reached its wooded confines on that memorable Sunday, May 21, 1854, no small homage is due for the fortitude they displayed in their two weeks’ anxious and wea-ther-exposed pilgrimage from Karori to Masterton—cattle accompanied—across mountain barrier and the long intervening journey afoot across the then roadless and bridgeless Wairarapa Plain. That one of their number was a young daughter of one of its small entourage but adds lustre to its fame. As a relic of first settlement days in Masterton, the old Dixon Accommodation House, almost intact, with its doors still clearly numbered, offers its proud resistance to the ravages of time since its first according a cosy shelter to many first-arriving families whose menfolk daily debouched therefrom to hew, from near-adjacent forested area, a clearing on which to erect humble dwellings and warm hearthsides of their own. In this building, from time to time, many families of pioneer settlers found first welcome to our town, and its preservation to an extent is a memorial to them as much as any finer epitaph engraved on wood or stone. As the perhaps only chance possessor of the actual electioneering pamphlet issued by the late Mr Joseph Masters, M.P.C., in 1870, I may here be permitted—in view of the impending Trust Lands Trust election —to recall by brief extract his word of warning to the people of Masterton and Greytown regarding the eventual handling of Trust affairs: —

“As the time will soon arrive when the information I possess relative to the Small Farm Association will not be available except in print, I am now induced (in this pamphlet) to put in permanent form what it is 'right you should know, and that your children should not forget —information which, at some future day, you or they may have cause to act upon if you (or they) are desirous to maintain your (or their) own rights, and have your (or their) children educated at small expense. . . .” Thus fortified, and as a third generation Mastertonian, I can but admire the outspoken inquiry of our veteran townsman, Mr Chas. E. Daniell, in your issue of Saturday' last, regarding the recent, past and near future trend of Trust Lands Trust affairs, particularly as regards educational grants. Making all due allowance for the intervention of earthquake calamity damage to Trust property generally, one still can but express deep concern at reading from time to time of late, almost pathetic eulogy of its “generosity” in making same—a phase of things undreamed of when Mr Daniell and the late Mr Alfred William Renall and others dealt royally in such matters, out of but most meagre funds compared with those handled today. Of a truth, let it not only be thought, but said: The late Joseph Masters (our town’s founder) was a far-sighted man. —I am, etc., N.J.B. Masterton, May 23.