Word on the street: Vera Rd, Whangamomona

There are not many roads in Taranaki named after local women, but whether Vera Rd is named after an early female settler is lost to history.

What is certain is that the road, about 3 kilometres north of Whangamomona off State Highway 43, was constructed in the late 1800s to provide access to farmland and played a short role in providing alternative access in and out of the valley via the Whanganui River.

The dream of early settlers was to bypass the terrible state of the main road into Whangamomona

(known in newspaper reports at the time as ‘‘the mud road’’) and provide a more reliable, pleasant and cheaper route for goods and passengers to access the inland area via the Whanganui and Ta¯ngara¯ukau Rivers.

For a time around 1900 the main road was almost impassable and it was difficult even to get food supplies into the district, causing freight costs to increase to the degree where the Government was forced to provide transport subsidies to settlers.

It was at this point that a plan was made to ease the transport issues by developing a river route.

Vera Rd played an important role in this proposal as in its early days it was much longer than it is currently and extended all the way through to Putikituna Rd, which at that time also reached as far as the Ta¯ngara¯ukau River and the steamer landing stage known as the Putikituna landing.

The new route and the district’s struggle with the state of its roads was so important it demanded a visit by the prime minister at the time, Richard Seddon.

He arrived in Whangamomona by coach, where he enjoyed a banquet before settlers discussed the issues of the district with him including getting him to inspect some of the roads.

The following day he travelled by horseback to the Ta¯ngara¯ukau River where he travelled by boat back to Whanganui.

However, the visit from the prime minister proved to be the pinnacle of the river route and Vera Rd’s prominence.

In 1904 a major flood in the district caused the Ta¯ngara¯ukau River to fill up with snags, caused mostly by the many logs felled during the deforestation of the land, and the project was abandoned.

Shortly after this, the decision was made by the Whangamomona County Council to shorten Vera Rd to its current length of just over a kilometre as the road was considered too costly to maintain.