LATE MR PERCY DIXON

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 July 1943, Page 2

LATE MR PERCY DIXON

DEATH RECALLS LOCAL HISTORY. Associated by name with Masterton settlement history from' its real commencement 89 years, ago, and born within its bushclad confines in the early ’sixties, the late Mr Percy Dixon, whose death occurred recently, was the second son of Mr David Dixon, one of" the first settlers to reach Masterton via the Rimutaka hinterland trail. MrPercy Dixon saw little of the growing town’s progress after the ’seventies, but never lost touch with it altogether. Upon revisiting his old home town last year the writer had the pleasure of a few strolls with Mr Dixon in . search of old landmarks and more especially old-time boyhood friends, .chief of whom were his cousin, Mr Charles Perry, and schoolmate, Mr Charles Bannister. These taught him to better appreciate the roaming pioneer’s sunniest smile when hailed .as “Percy” by these and other old-time Masterton friends. His visit to Worksop Farm, home of the Dixon grandparents, and one to the Henry Jones’s, of Makora, where he was nurtured as an infant early bereft of a fond young mother—the golden daffodils abloom where the old Dixon accommodation hoyse and stables stood ere razed by fire in the early ’eighties; the old mill-wheel which cut the chaff and ground the corn in Henry Jones’s days; and the nearby McKenzie family’s first leanto with « picture on its wall of the old plough, ox-drawn, reproduced in Mr Bannister’s fine brochure of Masterton early settlement days—these are but recent, yet homely recollections of one of our town’s local-born second generation pioneers whose burial took place today at the Martinborough cemetery. His wife predeceased him some years ago.—N.J.B.