52 Ancestors - Week 18 - Close Up - Ben Lovell

Twenty minutes walk away from home in the Motueka Cemetery is the grave of my 3x great grandfather, Ben Lovell. As I walk along Thorp Street, up Old Wharf Road and down Motueka Quay, I often wonder what Ben would think of the town he helped build. A lot has changed since his arrival here in 1842, over 175 years ago.

The "bones" of Motueka are still the same. The major roads across the plain remain laid out in the grid pattern from the 1842 survey by Samuel Stephens. The roads themselves would have been paid for, then built by labourers like Ben and his sons, Ben and Alfred. His son, Thomas, born here in 1845, definitely helped as he is recorded as a contractor for the Motueka Roads Board in the 1870s. Most of the native forest, sadly, is gone and Ben would have been part of that. As a sawyer, he would have cut down those rimu, matai and totara for export, firewood, fencing and building materials. The fertile land, where Maori had grown tons of potatoes in clearings under those forest giants, needed to be cleared for the settlers' farms.

There are still plenty of trees though. Large orchards grow cherries, apples and pears exported all over the world along with kiwifruit and hops. The once-lucrative tobacco industry has now disappeared, though. Around town, especially along Thorp Street, English trees planted by those settlers to remind them of home, are cloaked in autumn colour around now. Ben may have seen some of these as saplings and he would definitely recognise the song of the tui and fantails who have never gone away.

The wharf at Motueka Quay which was constructed around 1853 is still there. It's now a quiet place, the haunt of cyclists on the Great Taste Trail, and tourists looking at the wreck of the Janie Seddon. Ben would have used this once bustling wharf whenever he had to travel to Nelson which can just be seen in the distance across the sandspit and over the bay. The exports from Motueka have not stopped though. A new wharf was built in 1916 and is now owned by Talley's who employ a lot of local inhabitants to produce millions of dollars worth of fish and dairy products for export.

The cemetery where Ben was buried in 1873 is also quite changed. It must have been quite a lonely, isolated spot away from the town on the edge of the Moutere Inlet. Ben was probably one of the earlier "inhabitants" as he is in Row 1, right at the top of a sand ridge. Even today, he is close to the end of that row and his grave overlooks a grass area. Like everywhere else in Motueka, housing is beginning to encroach. Because the cemetery is on quite low ground between the sea and the inlet, I don't think it will ever be crowded out though.

I'm sure Ben made the right decision in 1841 to make that difficult voyage from Bristol to Motueka. The pioneer settlement which was dragged from the bush was a village at his death and is now a thriving town. I'm sure he would recognise it and be pleased with how it has developed.

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