Edward Bland Atkinson was born In England in 1824 and worked for the customs service at Carlisle before embarking for Otago on the John Wickliffe. Thomas Ferens recorded in his diary that Edward was one of a group of four who first went ashore on 23 March 1848 and ‘shared a meal of fish and sweet potatoes with the natives’. Edward, with his administrative background, was put in charge of the distribution of stores. Edward and Margaret Westland, a fellow passenger on the ship, were married on 5 March 1849 by the Reverend Thomas Burns ‘according to the Rites and Ceremonies of The Free Church of Scotland’ in the Royal Hotel, Dunedin. Their daughter, Elizabeth Bland, was born at their home ‘Viewforth’ on 25 November 1850. Margaret died of tuberculosis on 6 April 1852.
A year later Edward married Amelia Headland, newly arrived on the Maori.
In 1854 they were among the first settlers to move into North Otago; to Kakanui Station which he renamed ‘Clifton Falls’. His landholdings increased over the next decade until he was running sheep on over 33,000 acres.
The large dining room at the homestead became the centre for services conducted by visiting Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist ministers from Oamaru. Hymns were accompanied by the barrel organ which Edward had bought from a church in Dunedin (later donated by the family, it is displayed in the adjacent gallery).
To combat ‘scab’, sheep were dipped in water in which plug tobacco and sulphur had been dissolved. This duty-free tobacco was treated with arsenic to prevent its use for smoking, but it was packed so hard that men found they could smoke tobacco from the middle. When prices slumped in 1869, the bank foreclosed on Edward and he lost the station. He managed to salvage enough to buy land near Weston in 1874, and built a two-storey homestead ‘The Gorge’, where he lived until his death in 1886 at the age of 62.
Edward Bland Atkinson