Millstone memorial to Isaac Wilson and his Ohoka flour mill

Press, 14 March 1987, Page 22

Millstone memorial to Isaac Wilson and his Ohoka flour mill

The Ohoka countryside reveals few traces of a pioneer’s contribution to the district, but a roadside memorial cairn completed by his youngest son and the Eyre County Council this week will let passersby know what was there.

Dr Alan Wilson, a retired Christchurch G.P., and his wife, Amy, have been working on the project since 1976. The memorial to Isaac Wilson stands beside Mill Road, on the site of Wilson’s Siding, where a spur line ran across country to Ohoka Stream and Mr Wilson’s flour mill. A memorial stone was selected from a county quarry, and contains a large plaque. The stone is connected to an old millstone, laid flat as it would have been in the mill, from the mill founded by Mr Wilson. It was destroyed by fire in 1922.

The Wilsons were fortunate that a millstone had been kept nearby, at the front gate of a farmer whose land, now sold, contained the flour mill’s foundations. Half hidden at the site is the mill’s waterwheel axle, which lay in a pig yard on the farm. A hay barn stands inside part of the mill’s foundations, with the overgrown millrace running south of the stream. Dr Wilson’s father arrived in New Zealand about 1854. He lived with his family for several years in a St Albans slab hut and became, along with his brothers, a sawyer in the Papanui Bush. He later moved to Kaiapoi with his brothers, cutting bush for several more years. Then he began a coaching business. In 1870, Isaac Wilson started to mill flax on the Ohoka Stream’s south bank. According to a story in “The Press” that year, 21 men and boys were employed there.

The first flour mill north of the Waimakariri had been built at Kaiapoi in 1857. Mr Wilson started his flour mill beside the flax operation in 1872. It was one of three along the stream. Dr Wilson says the mill later used coal-fired steam to boost the power output when not enough

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water was available. The branch line railway, completed at first between Kaiapoi and West Eyreton, came later. It opened in 1875. The short spur, built to serve the Wilson mill but including a public siding, was built the next year. Dr Wilson says it was only 10 to 15 years ago when the Wilson's Siding station was pulled down, even though the branch line to Horrelville was closed in 1954. The tracks were kept open some years after that to serve a surviving flour mill. The railway line had followed the high ground wherever it was available. “Beyond the Waima-

STAN DARLING

kariri,” D. N. Hawkins’ history of the district, says that the first land buyers to interest themselves in the Ohoka area “were confronted with a tangle of halfsubmerged vegetation, winding creeks, and deep ponds.” The several parts of the land were named the Eyre, Ohoka, Wilson’s, Ohapuka, and Rangiora swamps. Isaac Wilson’s flour mill was opened between two others. It had a production capacity of 1600 tons a year. From 1882, when it was sold by Mr Wilson, it was owned and operated by Richard Evans.

At the height of a wool boom,

in 1879, Isaac Wilson and other businessmen formed the Kaiapoi Woollen Manufacturing Company to run a business that had also been a flax mill originally. He was the company’s first chairman, and one of 14 members on the board. Equipment salvaged from Mr Wilson’s former mill was moved after the 1922 fire to the Weatheral mill, upstream. The Kaiapoi Methodist Church, which opened in 1860, had Isaac Wilson as its first organist, a part he played during the church’s first 20 years.

He was the member of Parliament for Kaiapoi from 1881 to 1884 and was also a Canterbury provincial councillor, for Mandeville, in 1874-75. The memorial millstone sits in the concrete used to uplift it

from the gate of M. R. Godfrey, who donated it. His name is on a small plaque set in the millstone’s hub. Jack Horrell, a long-time Eyre County chairman (1941-1965) and district historian of land ownership, unveiled the memorial on Thursday. He remembers seeing the mill as a boy, and going there with his father the day after it was burnt down. Dr Alan Wilson saw Wilson’s Siding when he was a boy of nine or 10, but he does not recall seeing the mill. He was bom in 1909 at Sumner, the youngest of five boys by Isaac Wilson’s second marriage, and was only three when his father died in 1912. The Wilson home in Sumner, Brantholme, is now the Cavell Private Hospital.

Dr Wilson qualified as a doctor in 1934, then went off to England in 1936 ■ when his mother died. After four years in London, he joined a New Zealand brigade and served in the Middle East during the war. After the war, he was on the staff of a prisoner-of-war repatriation hospital in Kent, and eventually returned to Christchurch to set up a practice. When he retired in 1976, Dr Wilson and his wife became more interested in history, and the memorial project grew from their research. “I hope other people will do similar things,” he says.

Amy Wilson, who has helped with all the planning, says jokingly that she has had a millstone around her neck for the last 10 years.