A CONTRAST

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 308, 26 November 1936, Page 8

A CONTRAST

PALMERSTON 60 YEARS AGO. EARLY SETTLERS’ EXPERIENCES. Stumps and. fallen trees lay on the route which has since become r itzherbert Avenue, one of the. most attractive arterial roads of the city, and dugout canoes provided the means of crossing the Mamuvatu River, when Mr James Laurenson, now in his /9tli year, came to Palmerston North in 1875. These were the days when heavy standing bush occupied what are now the chief residential areas of the city and when hundreds of wild pigs had their freedom on the banks of the Manawatu River. • , Next month Mr Laurenson will be able to claim that he has completed sixty-one years of residence —the span of an average life——in Palmerston North. Furthermore,■ lie is still living in the house which he himself built on a section of one and a quarter acres purchased by his father for £2o, in Ferguson Street, when the family first settled at this centre. It falls to the-lot of comparatively few to see the steady transformation of an open clearing with scattered groups of buildings to a large and progressive city. Mr Laurenson has seen this transition in all its phases. Born in the Shetland Islands, Mr Laurenson journeyed as a lad in his ’teens with his parents from London to New Zealand in the full-rigged ship Avalanche, the passage occupying ninety days. They came to Palmerston North from Foxton in the old horse-drawn tram and spent their first Christmas in 'l'aonui Street, which, Mr Laurenson mentioned in the course of an interview, then rejoiced in the sobriquet of “Soapsuds Alley.” “There was no Palmerston North then,” stated Mr Laurenson to a “Standard” representative. “It was just a settlement, with a few shops clustered round ' an unfenced square which was really little more than a raupo swamp, with ti-trce and flax growing there. There were practically no roads, and Main Street was just a rough track. Fitzherbert Avenue had not been formed, but the bush had been felled along the road-line.” Though it was possible in those days, when the level of the Manawatu River was Jow, to ford it at the foot of Albert Street, this was an uncertain method, and dug-out canoes were used extensively. From witnessing the piles of the original Fitzherbert bridge, then an advanced type of wood construction, being sunk, Mr Laurenson saw this structure meet successive decades of transport until it outlived its usefulness, and he was present last year at the opening of the new ferro-concrete bridge. Beyond the old bridge, when it was first erected, he said, stretched an unbroken line of bush, and he was engaged in felling some of it at what is now the junction point of the Paliiatua Hill Road with the main road. Wild pigs were very numerous there, and also roamed the bank on the Palmerston North side of the Manawatu River in hundreds. Where his home now stands in Ferguson Street, Mr Laurenson used to venture into the bush to shoot pigeons. A SMALL COMMUNITY. Less than 300 people populated Palmerston North when he came to this centre, said Mr Laurenson. What subsequently' received the designation of Plague Creek (now running under the southern side of the city), owing to the general practice of making it a community rubbish dump as the settlement grew, was then a clear, running watercourse. It was possible to get a plentiful supply of good pure water from wells at a depth of twelve feet, in Ferguson Street. Theatres and motor-cars being undreamt of half a century ago, Palmerston North obtained its excitement from other sources. One of these was provided by the bushmen who made a small hotel (on the site now occupied by the Bank of New Zealand) thenrendezvous on Saturday nights and then adjourning at locking-up time to the edge of a big pool of water in the Square to settle their arguments. This was in the lieydey of the young settlement’s early life. Vivid recollections of the big flood of many years ago, when there were stretches of water from the inundation along Ferguson Street in • the vicinity of where Milverton Park now stands, are retained by Mr Laurenson. He stated that the Manawatu River broke its banks at Te Matai, poured round the terrace at that end of the township, and came down Plague Creek in a veritable deluge, ruining gardens and crops before the water found its way back to tli'e normal river course. Houses at Hokowhitu had to ,ie evacuated.