PLAQUE TO MARK SITE OF BUTLER'S HUT

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29368, 22 November 1960, Page 24

PLAQUE TO MARK SITE OF BUTLER'S HUT

Early next month the National Historic Places Trust plans to unveil a plaque on a cairn at the site of the first hut built and occupied by Samuel Butler when he went into the headwaters of the Rangitata to establish the sheep station, to which he later gave the name Mesopotamia. The Ministry of Works at Timaru is erecting the cairn and plaque which will be unveiled at a ceremony at which speakers will include Mr R. G. Gerard, the son of a former owner of the station, Mrs P. R. Woodhouse, chairmap of South Canterbury regional committee of the National Historic Places Trust, Mr J. D. Pascoe, national secretary of the trust and Mr W. J. Gardner, chairman of the Canterbury regional committee of the trust.

It is likely that the plaque will be unveiled by Mr Gerard and Dr. P. B. Maling, a historian who has recently had published by the Historic Places Trust a booklet describing Butler’s association with Mesopotamia. In search of likely country for a station Butler first ventured into the Rangitata country in April, 1860, at a time when most of the fairly readily accessible country had already been taken up. That same month he applied to take up 10.000 acres in this locality and in early May returned with two companions to build a hut some eight miles up Forest creek, a tributary of the Rangitata which joins it opposite the slopes of Mount Harper. The hut was built on a terrace at the junction of Forest creek and another creek now known as Butler’s. It was a V hut. “A V hut is a roof, in shape of course like the letter V set down, without any walls upon the ground—mine is 12ft long by Bft broad . . .” so wrote Butler. The roof was made with rafters of nothofagus or black beech cut from the bush close by. Domestic Comfort

When the hut was complete with chimney and slings for saddle bags, tea, sugar, salt and bridles, etc., and a “horse” for saddles, Butler was able to say “and now for some time this hut has been so neatly packed in the first instance and everything has been so neatly kept ever since that when we come into it of a night it wears an aspect of comfort quite domestic, even to the cat which sits and licks my face of a night and purrs, coming always just after we are in bed by means of a hole under our thatched door which we have left for her especial benefit.” Dr, Maling says that one hundred years later it is possible to identify the site of the hut by a faint trace —by post holes and by the presence of an assortment of nails beneath the overlying turf. There is a local legend that a door or window from this hut was built into the old Mount

Peel boundary hut, which is still in use. This stone hut dating from the 1860’s is some 20 minutes’ walk further up Forest creek. Butler has said that his V hut door was of thatch but one of the stone hut’s windows could well be a relic of the V hut. The site of the V hut was not on the land Butler had applied for so he purchased the freehold of it and to this day the title to it remains in his name.