In the early 1840s "it was usually easier to pile up the timber and burn it" than to transport logs out; at Boxhill in Khandallah the atrocious road condition could require eight or ten bullocks to pull carts through.
[2] William Mein Smith and the New Zealand Company cleared bush alongside the track and widened it in 1841, allowing the sale of sections along it from June.
A show of force in the Hutt Valley ended with Ngāti Toa given £2000 (in instalments) for the disputed land at Porirua.
[3] After the "Maori scare" of 1845-46 Governor Grey had the road from Jackson's Ferry or Fort Elliott in Porirua and The Barracks at Paremata to Wellington upgraded to fifteen feet (4.6 metres) wide by soldiers of the 58th and 99th Regiments under Captain Andrew Russell, assisted by Maori labourers.
Bishop Selwyn wrote in 1848: What an agreeable change from former journeys through the deep mud and fallen trees and the totara flats.
[7] The section from Box Hill to Johnsonville was built by Government surveyor Thomas Henry Fitzgerald as no road contractors would accept the risk.
Civilians used bill hooks, mauls, mattocks, picks and crowbars for the one and a quarter miles (2.0 km) at a cost of £721.
A horse-drawn wagon carrying two muzzle-loading cannon from Fort Paremata to Wellington rolled off "Russell's Folly" into the swamp below, from whence they were retrieved in the 1920s.
The original route via Oxford Street was superseded by the present main road through the shopping centre when an obstructing bluff was removed.