Denbigh Road sign (2022). Brian Beer word on the street collection.
Denbigh Road sign (2022). Brian Beer word on the street collection.
In the late 1870s, as Midhirst developed, some settlers chose to move out into the nearby bush and start clearing land. Around Denbigh Road, they had a choice of smaller blocks, closer to the main road, or larger blocks nearer the mountain. Not all the land was easily converted to profitable pastures.
A sawmill, set up in 1881, was immediately profitable and as more families moved in, Denbigh Road soon boasted its own school. By the First World War, much of the land had been cleared for farming.
One young man had hopes of making his way in life there. In 1919, Frank Sheldon Anthony used the government’s generous soldiers’ rehabilitation grant to buy land on Denbigh Road. The land was still considered ‘marginal’ at the time.
His timing was terrible, as it was for many returned soldiers attempting something similar. Land prices were booming. Paying top dollar, Anthony struggled to both repay his debt and develop the farm to be profitable in an environment of declining commodity prices and rampant inflation.
Perhaps another reason was his desire to be a writer. When he wasn’t working on the farm, he wrote humorous short stories about farming life, called ‘Me and Gus’. We can speculate he may have spent too much time writing, rather than working on his farm.
Anthony eventually sold the failed farm in 1924 and went to England, hoping to write for a living. Still only a young man, he died of tuberculosis in 1927.
In the 1940s a search for oil in the area saw a tall derrick, with a light on top of it, overlooking the lower Denbigh Road area. Nothing significant was found.
The old dairy factory, on the corner of the main road, was built in 1916. In the 1950s, Spic and Span Drycleaning was based there, then the M.L. Hignett engineering firm.
Today it seems our best guess can only be that Denbigh Road was named after the small town in north Wales.
This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.
Related plan:
Taranaki SO437 Sheet 1 Denbigh Road, ICS Pre 300,000 Cadastral Plan Index (Imaged by LINZ)
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