Minerva Terrace
Minerva Terrace takes its name from the barque Minerva, one of 10 ships that brought 721 pensioner soldiers and their families to New Zealand in the late 1840s to early 1850s as part of the Royal New Zealand Fencible Corps scheme.
When the Fencibles arrived in Auckland, they nearly doubled the town's population! Quite a few of Howick's original European settlers arrived on the Minerva itself, which makes it a genuinely important ship in our local story. It's hard to imagine what that journey must have been like for those families, setting off for the other side of the world to start again in a place they'd likely never seen.
The street wasn't actually named until 1930, when it was carved out of what used to be Cook Street, sitting above the green space we now call Stevenson Reserve.
A little extra history: Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts, and often associated with carpentry too. Perhaps by naming the ship after her, they hoped to secure safe passage to New Zealand? A fitting bit of symbolism for a voyage that would go on to shape so much of our local history.
