A chance comment over morning coffee during the recent school holidays brought our negligence to light. The biscuity treat accompaniment (in truth found lurking in the secret biscuit tin where it had been hidden an indeterminate while ago in an effort to stop it being inhaled in one sitting) was deemed “so stale it was probably brought out on one of the first four ships.”
“What’s the first four ships?” asked Farm Girl.
Feeling slightly embarrassed by our slackness, we decided the time was ripe to impart some local days-of-old knowledge to the youngest Homesteader. So it is that recent Union Homestead days off have taken a slight historical bent, starting off with exploring the a slightly more salubrious homestead: that of the Dean’s family, Christchurch’s undisputed founding fathers.
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Riccarton House
The two Deans brothers, John and William, were the first Europeans to set up home on the Canterbury Plains in 1843, pre-dating the “official settlement” of the area by seven years. Not that either of them got to live in this flash house;
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Their more humble abode, Deans’ Cottage, is the oldest building on the Canterbury Plains.
by the time it was ready for occupation they had both departed this mortal coil leaving John’s widow, Jane, to run the show. This she did in a no-nonsense display of doughty Scottish girl-power, until her death 1911. In 1914 the Deans family gave the almost 17 acres of bush surrounding the house to “The People of Canterbury” on the condition it be preserved in its natural state and in 1947 the Christchurch City Council reached into the kitty and bought the house as well.
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It’s prime real estate
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with the homestead surrounded by reminders of the homeland…
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while the “backyard” has been left as it was when the family arrived
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including the statuesque native Kahikateas
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with their amazingly long surface roots
A pleasant time was spent exploring the grounds and peering in windows until the smell of caffeine proved too alluring and we retired to a nearby cafe to fortify ourselves for another week on our very own, more modest patch of Christchurch soil.
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Be it ever so humble…
Union Homestead 
That is such an interesting story! Thank you for sharing, I love and admire the tales about the settlers. have a lovely weekend, Johanna
Thanks, you too 🙂
Great post, I keep forgetting how young a lot of New Zealand’s history is 🙂
As a settled country, ours is in its infancy but this chunk of land has been here a long time 🙂
What a fabulous place. But do enlighten us about the “first four ships”… I’m intrigued.
The first four ships, The Randolph, Cressy, Charlotte Jane and Sir George Seymour, are akin to the US Mayflower; they brought the first official settlers to Christchurch (carefully selected, across the socio-economic scale but all firmly Anglican 🙂 ) in 1850/51. Union Homestead history has no direct ties to these “first families”. we’re more recent imports and oOur existence here owes more to NZ’s need of “skilled migrants” in the 1950’s.
Fascinating – I don’t think I ever learned anything about the settlement of New Zealand in school and my subsequent reading has never touched on it.
Thanks for the history lesson, I loved the cottage reminding me of the first place I stayed in when I came to NZ in 1963. I boarded with an elderly woman whose parents’ home it had been.
The cottage is very compact compared to the palatial homestead, but in those pre-insulation days they would have been pretty chilly I would think 🙂
Langholm has a close connection with NZ and at any one time, there is almost always someone from Langholm visiting friends there. We has advertisements on our local paper in the mid 1800s offering free trips to NZ for shepherds and farm workers.
One branch of our family took advantage of the offer; they hailed from Kilmarnock way.
Everyone tells me what a wonderful place NZ is so they probably made a good choice.