Upper Hutt

Upper Hutt is in an area originally known as Orongomai and that of the river was Heretaunga (today the name of a suburb of Upper Hutt). The first residents of the area were Māori of the Ngāi Tara iwi. Various other iwi controlled the area in the years before 1840, and by the time the first colonial settlers arrived the area was part of the Te Āti awa rohe. Orongomai Marae is to the south of the modern city centre. In 1839, the English colonising company, The New Zealand Company made a purchase from Māori chiefs of about 160,000 acres of land in the Wellington region including Upper Hutt. The Hutt Valley is named after one of the founders of this company. Dealings from the New Zealand Company and following that, the Crown (after the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840), with local Māori regarding the land in Upper Hutt were flawed including not transacting with all the iwi that had claims on the land. Richard Barton, who settled at Trentham in 1841 in the area now known as Trentham Memorial Park, was the first European resident. Barton subsequently subdivided his land and set aside a large area that was turned into parkland. James Brown settled in the area that became the Upper Hutt town in 1848. Having divided the land into 100 acre block, the settlers set about clearing the land of its indigenous forest and turning it into farmland. Sawmillers milled larger trees, such as Totara, for building materials and burned off the remaining scrub and underbrush. was built as part of a stockade in 1860, during the New Zealand Wars.Alarmed by unrest in Taranaki and sightings of local Māori bearing arms, settlers in the Hutt Valley lobbied for the construction of fortifications in Upper and Lower Hutt. The government and the military responded by constructing 2 stockades in the Hutt Valley in 1860. While the stockade in Upper Hutt was manned for 6 months, the threat of hostilities soon passed and neither installation ever saw hostile action. The railway line from Wellington reached Upper Hutt on 1 February 1876. The line was extended to Kaitoke at the top end of the valley, reaching there on 1 January 1878. The line continued over the Remutaka Ranges to Featherston in the Wairarapa as a Fell railway, opening on 12 October 1878. By the beginning of March 1914, the area of Upper Hutt controlled by the Upper Hutt Town Board had its own water supply. The supply capacity was increased when the Birchville Dam was built in 1930. On the evening of 28 March 1914, fire broke out at the Benge and Pratt store in Main Street. An explosion killed 8 of the volunteers fighting the fire and destroyed the building. For many years, Upper Hutt was a rural service town, supporting the surrounding rural farming and forestry community. Serious urbanisation of the upper Hutt Valley only started around the 1920s, but from the late 1940s onwards, Upper Hutt's population exploded as people moved from the crowded hustle and bustle of inner-city Wellington into a more secluded yet sprawling Hutt Valley. In 1950, Trentham Memorial Park was created with an area of almost 50 hectares. Upper Hutt continued to grow in population and became a city within the Wellington metropolitan area on 2 May 1966 after the Government Statistician certified that the population had reached 20 000, allowing the Town Clerk to make an application for city status. On 9 April 1976, Upper Hutt became the first area in New Zealand to implement subscriber toll dialling (STD), allowing telephone subscribers to make national calls without operator assistance. Residential subdivision in areas such as Clouston Park, Maoribank, Tōtara Park and Kingsley Heights continued into the 1980s. In February 1979 Muhammed Ali came to New Zealand, staying at Upper Hutt. Historic places There are twelve historic sites within Upper Hutt included on the Heritage New Zealand list of historic places, including four Category 1 sites, seven Category 2 sites, and one historic area. The historic area, the Remutaka Incline Rail Trail, crosses into part of neighbouring South Wairarapa District. ==Geography==