The Bell Block.

Many people no doubt have been a trifle puzzled by that name, the site of the Taranaki aerodrome where thousands have waited to greet trans-Tasman fliers from Australia. Bell Block has nothing to do with a city block. There is a story of pioneer pluck and Maori war-thrill in the name. This pleasant rural spot, with its small farms and its aircraft ground, eight miles from New Plymouth, was a battleground in the fighting Sixties, when the English settlers who had been located there, refused to abandon it, and built a stockade to defend it. The Maori name is Hua. The English name is accounted for by the fact that this block of land was bought from the Taranaki Maoris by Mr. (afterwards Sir) Dillon Bell, father of the present Right Hon. Sir Francis Dillon Bell. He was the New Zealand Company's agent in New Plymouth, 1847–1848.

Originally consisting of .1,500 acres, the Bell Block was enlarged by further purchases, and in 1860 when the first Taranaki war began there were about seventy Englishmen and their sons of fighting age in the settlement. These sturdy sons of Devon and Cornwall soon had a hundred bullock-cart loads of timber on the spot selected for their fort, a leveltopped hill overlooking the little village.

Sketches of that day, by an artist settler, Frank Arden, show a stout stockade, a blockhouse and flanking towers. This compact little fort was occupied for several years as a useful half-way post between New Plymouth and Waitara. In 1860–61 it was customary to send a column of two hundred soldiers, with a howitzer (drawn by bullocks) to escort the provisions and ammunition carts from New Plymouth to Bell Block, along the rough Devon Road, the main thoroughfare northward, where hundreds of motorcars now speed daily along a smooth highway. Not a trace now remains of that hill-fort; the farmers' dairy cows graze on the rich grass where the palisades bristled and field-guns sent shot and shell over the fields at the Maori raiders on the bush-edge.