LATE MR R. WILTON

Wairarapa Times-Age, 14 July 1942, Page 2

LATE MR R. WILTON

A WORTHY PIONEER. EULOGY BY RT. REV. J. DAVIE. In the course of the funeral service held in connection with the death of Mr. Robert Wilton, the Right Rev. John Davie, Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, made feeling reference to the deceased. “The death of Ml. Wilton,” he said, “has removed yet another of the fast diminishing pioneers who have done so much for our district and given a very rich contribution towards the high standing Wairarapa has both for character and production. His father arrived in the Wellington harbour in 1840 in the ship Orient after which Oriental Bay was named. Another evidence of the early arrival of the family is seen in the name Wilton’s Bush. He married Miss Compton, a member of another pioneer family, in 1883. There were 16 children by the marriage. He went to Rangitumau and bought a section in 1890. There were no roads then, only bush tracks. Provisions and the material to build a house, iron, etc., had to be carried. The first night Mr and Mrs Wilton slept under the iron they carried up. Then they erected a one-roomed house, then a two-roomed one. Later, dictated by the demands of his growing family, the homestead of 12 rooms was built. Besides felling bush and making a farm and rearing a large family, he took a keen interest in the affairs of the district in which he lived. He was a member of the County Council, Farmers’ Union, was an original member of the Masterton Dairy Company, and at the time of his death he was a life member of the Masterton A. and P. Association and the Masterton Collie Club. He was a good stamp of citizen, always considering the well-being of the other fellow. While he was at Rangitumau he gave assistance to everybody and everything. I would like that to be the epitaph inscribed on the tablet of my life. The people of his day will soon all have passed on to their reward. Our day is even more momentous than theirs, and God is looking to us, upon whom he has laid the burden of obtaining the freedom of mankind, to show the same spirit of enterprise, endurance, courage and determination to win through as that shown by the early pioneers of this favoured garden in God’s own country, the most favoured of all the places of the earth.”