Ostler Homestead

Photo on left: The Ostler homestead, built more than 80 years ogo, as it is today [1970s?]. Part of the old verandah is still visible and some of the rooms remain in their original positions. Rooms on the left were cut off by a previous owner.

Helen Wilson (nee Ostler) described Te Kama Clearing as it was when a surveyor for the Horowhenua Block took them to view it. She was then a young woman living with her mother.

We saw what looked like extensive park lands, the turf, short and well kept, like a bowling green, was studded with trees - tall, stately, wide spreading trees and shrubs. Each tree was trimmed at exactly the same height from the ground, with the utmost precision, as level as a ceiling.

The whole looked like a well-kept plantation or park. Our ecstatic cries provoked a loud, startled snort, and a sudden tap of hooves, and before we could speak, a splendid black stallion galloped past, followed, in single file, by about 20 wild horses of various sizes and colours, their picturesque manes and long tails streaming behind them.

"These are your lawn mowers", remarked the surveyor. "They keep your trees well clipped too".

The clearing was about eight or nine acres, and nine giants of the forest had been left standing in ti-tree, three rimu, one rata, two kahikatea, and four matai. Their huge barrels ran up straight for 100 feet and then they branched out as they never can in the dense bush, a truly noble spread.

£ 4 Deposit

We paid, if I remember right, a £4 deposit and the same sum each year with the added provision that we must occupy it and must effect each year certain improvements.This was surely land settlement on easy terms.

The first part of the house, 12 feet by 12 feet, was built by a bush carpenter. It had one window and the exterior was built from rough face cuts, the first cut off logs to which the bark still adhered. The timber was thrown off on the mill tram line. Sappy boards from the mill were bought for practically nothing.

Helen built the kitchen on to the whare as soon as the shingling was finished. The timber was loaded on at the mill in the right order of use by her future husband, Mr C K Wilson.

Colonial oven

He helped us with a second big wooden chimney, in which my mother set, in puddled clay, the colonial oven that had served as a cupboard. We could now bake bread and roast the game that was occasionally brought to us.

Next, for my architectural blood was up, I built a bathroom. We had only a zinc washing tub.

After that, a year perhaps, we built another bedroom for my sister who was due from Melbourne. We lined, sealed, scrimmed and papered that room. The paper was only newspaper, but it was washed with whiting and tinted pink with a tube of crimson lake, out of my mother's Winsor and Newton water-colours.

It was a queer room, the kitchen-cum-living room. We had whitewashed the walls, finding out - or being told- that a slab of glue melted and added to the wash, made a smooth surface that did not rub off.

The chimney was like a small room, with whitewashed hobs and a high mantelpiece. When, as sometimes happened later, more guests came than there were chairs, the young fry would have to sit in the chimney.

Piano, Too

There was the incongruous piano, the unheard of table, the mixture of carved oak chairs and deal boxes and the window merely a rectangular space in the wall, with a penthouse eyebrow outside and shutters fastening from the inside.

Mrs B M Goldsmith, in her records, can remember one stage of the house. "I can picture it today - three rooms, furniture homemade and skin rugs; then outside, honeysuckle and roses completed the picture. They lived there until they built the big house joining the Fairfield Estate that the Seals had".

Cashmere Homestead

Newspaper clipping - Unknown source per Horowhenua Historical Society

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On 22 August 1972 The Chronicle ran the following item:

Ostler Homestead

The present owner of the old Ostler homestead, Mr S Desborough, is willing to donate the house to the borough council or any interested organisation which will remove it for preservation.

If his offer is not taken up, he will advertise it for sale and removal. The house is in the path of a planned subdivision of his property.

"We have got to make way for progress," Mr Desborough said. "We can't finish the subdivision until we get rid of the house."

The borough council had granted permission for him to shift the house to another site to live in, but he did not think he would go ahead with this. However, he is anxious to see an interested group of people preserve the homestead.

"It would make a good museum. It would not cost much to get it back to its original order," he said.

Since 1951
Mr Desborough and his family have lived in the house since 1951. He has had many visitors drop into the old homestead, with reminiscences of its earlier days.

At the turn of the century it was a popular venue for Salvation Army picnics, with bandsmen and children marching out to the farm from Levin.

The original hook for the cooking pots was found behind the chimney by the Desboroughs.

"The house has changed a lot inside but we have had people around who were born in it, and could still recognise the present rooms," Mr Desborough said.

Chopped off
A room on the eastern side of the house was chopped off by one of its owners but the original match lining, ceiling, parquet flooring and some of the doors remain.

Mr Desborough was told at one stage the verandah had 16 doors.

The old duck pond, which originally attracted both the Muaupoko and Mrs Ostler because it was one of the only supplies of fresh water in the Horowhenua, was filled in about three years ago for subdivision.

But Mr Desborough is still using pure spring water from a bore tapped some years ago.

The old cow bail on the property was blown down in 1931.