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Long-time Leigh resident Jo Evans has just finished and self-published his second book, The Early European Settlers of Little Omaha, which took him nearly four years to research and write.
You may be wondering where exactly Little Omaha is – well, this is the place name once given to the town and surrounding area now known as Leigh.
Evans says the locality is called the Village of Leigh on a map from 1858 and that the earliest mention of the name Little Omaha is about 1864. It became Leigh sometime in the early 20th century.
“The book will appeal to people who are either Leigh locals or visitors the area. If you’ve ever thought, ‘I wonder who the first people to stay in this house or live on this farm were’, then this is for you.
“Using the survey maps in the book you’ll be able to find the lot number, then go to the lot summary and find out who purchased it. With the names you can look up the story of a particular person or family, which is further on in the book,” he says.
Evans, who has lived in Leigh for more than 50 years, says his intention was to tell stories about the early settlers that he gleaned from different sources and put them all in one place.
He wanted to document how a community was “developed from the efforts of those intrepid families who risked much to carve out a new life in an alien place”.
“There was a lot of history that hadn’t really been published previously,” Evans says.
The meticulous daily diaries of settler Charles Septimus Clarke, which he kept from the age of 19 in England till his death in Whangateau aged 85, were an invaluable source of information.
“Clarke would mention a name, but often there would be no detail about the person and so I found it very satisfying to first check the property transactions and then go to Papers Past (which provides digitised primary source material online) from the National Library of New Zealand.”
Evans was first inspired to write the book when the Leigh Library asked him to perform as Clarke, who founded the library in 1871 (MM, May 4, 2021), to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
“Because of my beard, they asked me if I would impersonate Clarke and tell the audience how, as Clarke, I came to set up the library. So I had to do some research in order to do that.
“That stimulated my interest and so I started learning about the various names of people and families that I wanted to find out a bit more about. It all happened from there.”
Evans says so far he’s put copies of the book in the Warkworth Museum, Warkworth Library, Leigh Library and Waipu Museum.
For a copy of The Early European Settlers of Little Omaha, email Jo Evans at jo.hose.evans@gmail.com
