Roads of Ohoka

As written for the community newsletter by Sue Allison

Wilsons Drive

Edward Wilson was an old settler in north Canterbury. He was born at Heighray, North Lancashire, England, and arrived in Lyttelton in 1852. He first settled in St Albans, Christchurch, but soon moved to Church bush, Camside, near Rangiora, where he was actively engaged in farming for 35 years. In 1892 he sold his farm and bought 96 acres of land in Ohoka and settled there. For some time he served as a member of the local school committee. In 1883 he married the widow of the late Mr S. Read, builder, of Chch. He died in 1897.

Keetley Place

Councillor Tom Edward Keetley was a member of the Kaiapoi Borough Council from 1901. Born in 1856 in Derbyshire, England, he came with his parents to New Zealand in 1858 on the ship, Mystery. The family settled at Kaiapoi, where Tom Keetley went to school. Afterwards he learned his trade as a blacksmith, with a forge on the corner of Piraki and Fuller Streets. He was a member of the Waimakariri Harbour Board from 1900, served on the Kaiapoi Fire Brigade and was chairman of the Kaiapoi School board for seven years. He and his wife had six sons and six daughters.

Tram Road

Tram Road is so named because it was originally designated for a horse-drawn tramway to transport timber from Harewood Forest.

Harewood Forest, which originally covered 56,000 acres, was the magnet that attracted the sawmilling community from which Oxford grew. The chief market for the Harewood Forest timber was Rangiora or Christchurch, and almost the only means of conveyance bullock dray. The journey was slow, tedious and risky.

The first reference to the proposed “tramway”, leading from the ferry crossing the Waimakariri River westward to Oxford’s Harewood Forest, was in 1855 when the Chief Surveyor, Thomas Cass wrote to John Boys instructing him to traverse and mark the ground for two miles, placing  split pegs every five chains.

Consequently, Tram Road was for a while known as Boys Tram Road. For many years, horse-drawn drays travelled the road, although the proposed wooden tramway never eventuated due to the construction of the steam engine line from Rangiora.

An early experiment in speeding up transport was made by Richard Perham, who purchased, at considerable expense, a traction engine and trucks to cart timber. It was a great day for Oxford when the big traction engine started off down Tram Road bound for Christchurch, but the hopes of the promoters were shattered when, after making the second trip, it was found to be too costly and the enterprise was abandoned.

The railway to Oxford was completed in 1875, and from then until the demise of milling in the early 20^th century, this became the primary means of transport for the timber traders.

Until 1936, a daily passenger train also served the line.

Tram Road is today one of the busiest arterial roads in North Canterbury. A 29km stretch of the road is one of the longest straight roads in New Zealand.

Whites Road

Joseph Senior White arrived in Canterbury in 1856. He had a mysterious background, having apparently been mixed up in some trouble in Australia that was described as the “Ballarat scandal”. This may well have been the 1854 Eureka stockade, an armed rebellion by gold diggers objecting to the Australian government’s enforcement of mining licences.

White’s given name was Josiah, but he chose to go by the name “Joseph”. However, he came to be known as “Bully” White.

In 1858, White opened his Beehive store beside the wharf in Kaiapoi. This was a typical country town emporium of merchandise. Over the years he owned a number of businesses in Kaiapoi and Saltwater Creek, and was clearly successful. His altruism was shown in 1880 when he gifted three-quarters of an acre of land to the Kaiapoi Borough Council for recreational purposes. He named  it Darnley Square. In 1883 he made another large gift to the borough – of tree and shrubs to be planted in the square.

By  the mid-1860s, White had purchased one of two large estates carved out of a tract of land known as  Wai-iti. His 1000-acre portion was known as Ohoka and encompasses much of our district. The other estate Swannanoa, was bought by an American, John Evans Brown.

In 1865 the first steam threshing machine was imported, and Joseph White was among the early contractors in the district. He grew over 300 acres of wheat as well as oats and barley, keeping the Ohoka flour mills busy.

“Bully” White set about bringing trees into “the appalling barrenness of the Eyre country”. As an experiment he imported over 100,000 oak, elm, ash and beech seedlings and planted huge wind breaks, shelter belts and ornamental plantations in spite of the fact that the soils were generally considered unsuitable. While large numbers of these trees did not strike, his efforts did much to beautify the land centring on his two-storey brick home, the Ohoka Homestead, which still stands today with its entrance on Jacksons Road. The wooden gate-house, which originally stood at the Whites Road entrance, was gifted to the gardener and moved to Jacksons Road some 100 years ago. (It can be glimpsed from the road 1.5km from Ohoka School, on the same side of the road.)

It is hard to find out what happened to the White family. It is believed that Joseph White’s son and daughter were educated in England and stayed there.

*Much of this information came from Beyond the Waimakariri by D.N.Hawkins; the Cyclopedia of New Zealand; and Survey of Ohoka School  District by the pupils of 1943.\, The Story of Oxford 1852 – 1932 by Lancelot Watson; Oxford: The First Hundred Years by O.A Gillespie.