Native American roots for church
Coronavirus travel restrictions mean Kiwis can’t enjoy day trips or weekends away but lockdown can be a chance to rediscover hidden gems closer to home. Press reporters explore their neighbourhoods as part of a series called Round Our Way.
I had driven past it twice a day for the last few years, but never stopped to look.
The lockdown gave me a chance to properly explore my neighbourhood and the small white church on the side of Tram Rd in Swannanoa, North Canterbury.
Pine trees shield the building from the road, making it hard to examine as you pass in your car.
Approaching on foot, I was finally able to satisfy my curiosity. The first thing you encounter is a pair of white iron gates with the dates 1873 and 1973 wrought into them. Beyond the gates sits the church and behind that a small graveyard waiting to be explored.
It is a simple wooden church with a hint of 19th century gothic about its long thin windows and green, vaulted doors.
A lone, dead tree sits at the back boundary, beyond which you can see straight across the Canterbury Plains and the Waimakariri River to the Port Hills.
As the gates indicate, the church was officially opened in November, 1873 with a tea evening in a large marquee erected next to the new Wesleyan Chapel. The Lyttelton Times called the building ‘‘a very neat structure’’.
The construction of the church was mainly funded by American immigrant and local MP John Evans Brown. It was Brown who gave the township of Swannanoa its unusual name.
He named his North Canterbury homestead Swannanoa after a small valley town in North Carolina. This US town was in turn named from a Native American Cherokee phrase either meaning ‘beautiful river’ or a trail belonging to the Suwali tribe.
One of the first references to Swannanoa in Kiwi newspapers was in The Press in 1865, when Brown called for tenders to build a new school.
By February 1873, a few months before the church opened, the local post office changed its name from Mandeville Plains to Swannanoa. The name stuck despite a petition signed by ‘‘all but three of the residents of Mandeville Plains’’ calling for the original to remain.
Brown would later return to North Carolina, discover mica in land owned by his father and become very rich. He built an ornate home with his newfound wealth that he called Zealandia Castle and then he died.
But he left behind in New Zealand the word Swannanoa, plucked from the mouth of a Cherokee and planted on this flat land. And the church he helped build still stands along with a graveyard full of headstones dating back to the 1870s.