Maker: Adele Hickford

Panel number: 420

Petition sheet number: 509

Person honouring: Harriet Humphrey

Relationship to maker: None

In 1940, at the celebration of New Zealand’s Centennial in Feilding, Harriett Humphrey was the oldest living pioneer settler. She cut the Centennial cake and placed the foundation stone for the cricket pavilion at Kowhai Park.

Harriett Chown was born and educated in London in 1847. She married in 1866 at St Pancreas Church, Euston Road, London. She taught her husband to read and write.

With her husband and four children, she travelled to Wellington on the Euterpe, arriving in 1874. They were part of a group of settlers who established Feilding in the bush-clad Manchester block. The first church services in Feilding were held in their Manchester Street home.

After travelling so far, Harriett never left her local district. As well as raising 11 children (two died in childhood) on their farm at Makino, she worked outside with her husband at the end of a cross-cut saw, carrying slabs until her shoulders bled. Such was the life of a Pākehā settler. 

As an active community participant, Harriett signed the 1891 suffrage petition and the successful 1893 petition. 

Harriett was an adept chess player, one known to let her husband win the last game of an evening so he went to bed happy.

She died in 1941 at age 93 years.

Panel materials: Washed/used calico.The background is stamped with kawakawa leaves, using acrylic paint, to represent the trees in the Manchester block where Harriett and her husband were among the first settlers. A wash off blue sky and impressions of pohutukawa flowers added with acrylic paint. Harriett’s name stitched using 46 chain stitches – a nod to the chains/demands of having 11 children and all her work sawing and lugging logs of wood around! Pieces of wood veneer glued on to represent the stacks of logs that Harriett helped her husband saw and carry. Information from the online biography supplied by Julia True written onto the panel with fabric marker pen.