Our Story
A church born of the settlement of Trentham — worship, remembrance and community since 1862.
St John’s owes its existence to Richard Barton, the first European settler of the district — and for more than a century and a half it has remained a place of worship, remembrance and community in the heart of Trentham.
A church born of the settlement of Trentham
Richard Barton arrived in Wellington in 1840 aboard the Oriental, one of the New Zealand Company’s first ships, and took up a farm of about 100 acres in the Upper Hutt valley. He named it Trentham after the Staffordshire estate of the Duke of Sutherland, whose lands he had once managed in England — a name that spread to the whole locality and survives today in Barton Road, Barton Avenue and the native bush remnant of Barton’s Bush. Barton and his wife Hannah settled permanently on the land in 1846, and as the small farming community grew, the need for a place of worship grew with it.
Anglican services were first held in settlers’ homes and in Barton’s store. In the early 1860s the building of a permanent church began, its construction overseen by the Reverend Frederic Thatcher, one of colonial New Zealand’s foremost church architects. The first vicar, the Reverend J. E. Herring, visited on 27 December 1861 and recorded the first baptism on 30 March 1862. He was succeeded by the Reverend Amos Knell in September 1863. The Barton family gave both the land and generous financial support, and on 17 December 1865 Bishop Charles Abraham, first Bishop of Wellington, consecrated the new church and its “church-acre”. Richard Barton died the following year and was buried in the churchyard he had helped to found.
Growth with the district
The completion of the railway to Upper Hutt in 1876 accelerated the district’s growth, and the church was enlarged to match. In 1884 the distinguished ecclesiastical architect Frederick de Jersey Clere was commissioned to add the chancel and sanctuary, giving the building much of its present form. A vicarage was built in 1894, and a vestry followed in 1914.
The early twentieth century brought renewal under the Reverend Cecil J. Smith, who arrived in January 1903 and revitalised parish life, ministering across five surrounding communities until he moved to Ōtaki in 1908. As the population spread, St John’s gave rise to daughter churches — St Hilda’s (around 1910) and St Mary’s, Silverstream (March 1931) — both of which later became independent. In 1946 the Trentham parish achieved full parish status.
A living heritage
Post-war expansion continued: the church was enlarged by extending its sides in 1955, a new parish hall was built in the 1960s, a foyer was added in the 1980s, the interior ceilings were re-lined in 2004, and the foyer was upgraded again in 2022 with a kitchenette and modernised facilities. In 1983 Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga recognised the church’s significance, registering it as a Category 2 historic place (List No. 1330) — one of the oldest surviving Anglican churches in the Wellington region. Today a new vicarage is planned, the next chapter in a long story of building and rebuilding for the sake of the Gospel.
The churchyard
The churchyard is itself a treasured part of the district’s heritage — the earliest European cemetery in the area, where more than a thousand people are buried, among them many of Upper Hutt’s pioneer families. It holds the Commonwealth war graves of three New Zealand soldiers of the First World War and two of the Second, a quiet reminder of the parish’s nearness to Trentham Military Camp, which from 1916 trained thousands of New Zealand soldiers. The stone wall and lych-gate at the entrance were built in 1924 as a memorial to the fallen.
Our story in brief
Curious about who we are today? Read Our Dreams, Values & Beliefs, or plan a visit — you’d be very welcome.