William Mein Smith
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Mein Smith was a key actor in the early settlement of New Zealand's capital city, Wellington. As the Surveyor General for the Wakefield's New Zealand Company at Port Nicholson from 1840 to 1843, he and his team surveyed the town of Wellington, after finding the land on the Petone foreshore unsuitable, laying out the Town Belt and other features.
Born in 1799 in Capetown, he was raised in Devon and the Scottish Borders, served in the Royal Artillery in Canada (where he met his wife Louisa) in Gibraltar and at the Royal Artillery Academy at Woolwich before signing up to assist the Wakefields in 1839. He and his team of surveyors sailed to New Zealand on the New Zealand Company ship Cuba, arriving on January 3 1840 in the harbour of Te Whanganui a Tara (Port Nicholson). His wife and older children arrived two months later.
He was instrumental in the Wellington colony's early administration, the setting out of the town (including reservation onf one tenth for Maori owners), and country acres, and was gazetted as a magistrate. His name survives today in Mein Street, Wellington.
He sailed down the South Island in 1843 to help locate another site for settlement by the New Zealand Company, and was an early visitor to what is now Christchurch, though was shipwrecked in the course of the trip. Later he surveyed a number of other parts of the lower North Island, including some townships in Wairarapa, and spent time seeking a better route through the mountains to Wellington.
He represented the district briefly on the short-lived Legislative Council in the early 1850s.
He is probably as well known for his many water colours and sketches of early Wellington and Wairarapa, many of which are held by Wellington's Alexander Turnbull Library.
He died in Greytown New Zealand in 1869 after establishing one of the earliest cattle and sheep runs in the Wairarapa, at Huangarua, near modern Martinborough, with his friend Samuel Revans in about 1847, when he seems to have left his first home under what is now Tinakori Hill, Wellington.
