Thomas William Adams
Farmer, forester, churchman, educationalist (1842–1919)
Alfred Albert Thomas William Adams (24 June 1842 – 1 June 1919), known as Thomas William Adams or more commonly TW Adams, was a New Zealand farmer, forester, churchman and educationalist.
He was born in Graveley, Cambridgeshire, England on 24 June 1842. In 1862 he emigrated to New Zealand on the African. He bought 100 acres (40 ha) of virgin tussock land at Greendale in Canterbury in 1865 and converted them to farmland. The area prospered over the next few years as more farmers developed land.
Adams married Lucy Pannett in 1867 and they had a daughter the following year. Lucy drowned in 1869. Adams married her sister Harriet in 1872, and they had five sons and three daughters together.
Adams was a pioneer in planting trials, obtaining seeds from correspondents around the world, keeping records and publishing the results. He started planting trees in 1868 for shelter and fuel, and by 1908 had created an arboretum of 800 species.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas William Adams” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.