EARLY MANAWATU

Manawatu Standard, Volume LI, Issue 26, 31 December 1930, Page 8

EARLY MANAWATU

COUPLE’S GOLDEN WEDDING

Having resided in New Zealand practically all their lives, Mr and Mrs John Goodin celebrated their golden wedding at their residence in New Plymouth on Christmas Day. The function was of a very quiet nature, only members of the family being present. Mr Goodin, who was horn in Birmingham, England, arrived in New Zealand at the age of four with his parents, Mr and Mrs H. Goodin, and two sisters nearly 75 years ago by the boat Oliver Lang. His father was a sawyer and settled at the Hutt. When Mr Goodin was eight years old they removed to Pahautanui. At the age of 17 Mr Goodin took land on Lee’s Line, Feilding, where he went in for cropping and dairying, being one of the first in the Manawatu to grow wheat successfully. Eleven years later, on Christmas Day, 1880, he married Miss Ann Stringer, who at the age of 9£ years had landed in the Dominion with her parents, Mr and Mrs Leonard Stringer. Mr and Mrs Stringer had come to the colony with their family of 11 children under the Land Corporation, of which Mr Halcombe—after whom the town was named—was manager. They arrived at Wellington by the Waikato in 1874 and a few days later went to Wanganui by paddle steamer, thence proceeding by horse conveyance to Bulls, which was the extent of the metalled roads. TRAVEL THROUGH MUD. They had to take that circuitous route on account of the Maori troubles. The Maoris had a week or so previously shot a coach horse at Awahuri and blocked the main road. Mrs.Goodin well remembers having to remain at Bulls for three weeks, the family having to sleep under a billiard table as no beds were available. They were then taken through the open run by drays to Feilding, as the roads were not deemed safe. The route traversed was in places up to the horses’ girths in mud; the mud even invaded the bottom of the dray. At that time there were practically no houses or fences in Feilding, which comprised a sawmill with a few whares and tents as well as one small building erected high on posts to keep the stores out of the floods to which the district was subject. That acted also as a butcher’s shop. The only building with any claim to pretension was a fourroomed boarding-house. The Stringer family was provided with one V-hut 12ft. wide by 15ft. long. It was called a V-hut because it practically represented an inverted V, having • a boarded roof with steep gables so as to shed the water. The walls were just two boards high. There were a small window and a door but no fireplace, and Mrs Goodin remembers assisting her parents and brothers to build a sack and scrub shelter for a cookhouse. That was their home for the first four months, during which they spent a very happy time though they always had to be on their guard against the depredations of the wild pigs and wild cattle that had free run of the place. After they had been in the district twelve months matters began to take shape as hundreds of migrants had arrived. Feilding at that time was all bush, a very pretty place. WORK ON RAILWAY. Mrs Goodin’s next home was a small cottage on the railway line at Beattie Street. It possessed clay chimneys and clay floors. Here Mrs Goodin’s parents resided for 40 years. The only work at the time of arrival was the'railway construction to Wanganui on which the immigrants received 9s per day, but as there was no opportunity for spending money as there is to-day the men were paid mostly in stores. Mrs Goodin vividly recollects the first church service ever held in Feilding, Rev. Peter Jones, a Methodist minister, preaching from a box at the site of the present square, there being no church in the place. \Vhen nearly 17, on Christmas Day, 1880, Mrs Goodin was married, the ceremony being performed by Rev. Mr Parsonson, a Wesleyan minister, at the residence of her sister, Mrs James Ruff, Manchester Street, Feilding. She went straight to the Lee’s Line farm which her husband had already brought into working order and on which he had built a home. There for 24 years they prospered, rearing a family of six sons and a daughter. After a brief period in charge of an hotel at Halcombe and another brief period on dairy farms (milking over 200 cows at Taonui and Feilding) they removed to Taranaki, where they were dairying successively at Whakamara Inglewood, Okato and Pungarehu. Mr and Mrs Goodin removed to New Plymouth about 12 years ago. Mr Goodin in his early days was a keen mounted volunteer under Colonel Gorton, though ,he never actually saw service. He with others received grants of 40 acres rural and two acres urban land. The former was near Palmerston North and the latter in Feilding. Like the majority at. that time Mr Goodin did not anticipate future values and sold the land cheaply. Of the sons four served for several years in the volunteers under Colonel Watt, Wanganui. Of the family of six boys and two daughters (the youngest of whom was born at Halcombe), there are surviving Messrs Frank (Okato), Jack (Warea), and Sid (Pungarehu) and Mesdames Arthur Kemp (Kaponga) and Victor White (Palmerston North). Two sons were victims to the influenza epidemic and the other was killed in an accident. There are 29 grand-children. Mr Goodin, who is 78, and Mrs Goodin, who is 66, are both in good health.