Donald Reid

Donald Reid was the quintessential Otago pioneer. He came from a Highland family and was born at Strathtay in Perthshire, Scotland, in 1833. When he was a small boy his family moved to Edinburgh. His father died there in 1844 and Reid was sent to stay with his relations on the family farm in Perthshire. A couple of years later he emigrated with his mother, stepfather and brother to the new Scottish settlement in Otago. He was 16 years old, with few resources but plenty of grit and determination.

Reid began work in Dunedin as a labourer and by the time he was 18 had saved enough money to buy some land of his own. He gradually added to his holdings and in 1856 moved out to the Taieri plain where his property ‘Salisbury’ (named after the Salisbury Crags of Edinburgh) was to become a model farm.

In 1854 Donald married Frances Barr. The couple had four sons and five daughters together before Frances died in 1868. Six years later Donald married a young widow, Sarah Price. She already had two sons and then had a daughter with Donald. The large Reid family lived in an impressive homestead designed by the noted Dunedin architect Robert Lawson. It replaced the original wattle-and-daub cottage that Donald had built when they first moved to the Taieri and symbolised his rapid rise in prosperity.

He was a canny farmer and an astute judge of men. During the gold rush, for example, he made a deal with his farm workers: they would all go up to the goldfields together and split any proceeds but return to the farm for the harvest in spring. This was a great way of dealing with ‘gold fever’ but retaining the service of his workers.

Reid later became a provincial and then a national politician, serving as Minister of Immigration for a time in the 1870s. But he was never as notable on the national scene as he was in Otago. There he had huge mana as a man of unimpeachable integrity who epitomised all the values of thrift, hard work and honesty that were so esteemed by the Presbyterian Scots. Later in life Reid established a stock and station agency that also became very successful and survives to this day as Reid Farmers.

In 1900 Donald Reid became President of the Otago Early Settlers Association. He was a great figurehead, ensuring that the organisation and its Museum had the support of the pioneering families who held him in such high esteem. When he tried to resign from the position the Association wouldn’t let him, prevailing upon him to remain at its head until his death in 1919. His substantial bequest to the Association underwrote the Museum’s first expansion with the addition of the Donald Reid Wing in 1921.