A PIONEER’S LIFE

Western Star, 26 March 1920, Page 3

A PIONEER’S LIFE

WELLINGTON'S FIRST WHITE CHILD. The distinction, of being the first white child born in Wellington is claimed by Mr Thomas Rodgers, now residing at Rangitikei Line. This week Mr Rodgers celebrated his eightieth birthday, and to a Mauawatu Standard reporter he gave some interesting details of Its 1 fe. In January, 1840, his mother and father, who came from the County of Essex, landed on the Petonc beach. They were supplied with a certain amount of canvas from the vessel in which they had made the voyage, and were able to erect a small, shade at the fringe of the bush that reached right down to the shore. In this his parents took up their abode, and a month later the first white child to be born in the Wellington district was ushered into life. Then a month later, so great are the ironies of life on occasions, his father lost his life by drowning. A party were returning from the other side of the harbour in an open boat with a stiff “southeaster’’ blowing, when* the craft capsized, and nine of the occupants, including Mr Rodger’s father perished—and they were all men who had just completed the voyage from England, which in those days occupied! six months, and in a small sailing ship was a proceeding fraught with a considerable element of peril. Mrs Rodgers married again later, but her second venture was as ill-fated as the first, for her second husband weife killed by the Maoris within two or three years. Mr Rodgers was still quite a child, and has -but vague memories of those very early day's, but up to the age of fifteen he lived} with his twice-widowed mother, and looked after two or three cows and a garden. Affrays with the* natives were of frequent occurrence in the days of his childhood, and he can call to mind times when he and his mother crouched behind the pile of big stones that formed the chimney while the men fought to repulse sorties by parties of natives. The obvious task was hushwork, and at the age of fifteen ho swung his axe in forests in the Hutb Valley now long since disappeared. In 1866 lie married, and lived in the Hutb Valley and later in the Wairarapa. Eventually he found his way to a tiny settlement where the town of Pamerston North now stands, and in 1888 purchased from the Government a. block of 10C*> acres of land covered in .standing bush that is now the fertile farm on* which Mr Rodgers resides on Rangitikei Line. Mrs Rodgers died in Avgust, 1918, at the ago of 78 years. Out of the family of eight children, four dailghteYs and tv,'o' son?* arc living.