In 1820 the European population of the Hunter Valley outside the penal colony at Newcastle, which held about 670 prisoners and a few score guards, numbered only in the dozens.
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Several people were farming at Patersons Plains, between today's Paterson and Woodville, and another tiny farm settlement had been established at Wallis Plains: both were the idea of Governor Lachlan Macquarie. There were also a few escaped convicts mostly living with Aboriginal groups.
Less than a decade later, the colonial census of 1828 enumerated 3260 Europeans in the Hunter Valley and this despite the virtual closure of Newcastle as a penal station by relocation of the prison function to Port Macquarie in 1822-23.
A land rush of free settlers had occurred, fuelled by a governmental realisation that the time for large-scale settlement of New South Wales had arrived.
At the same time the end of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe had created an influx of former army and naval officers anxious to create new, profitable careers. Moreover, capital previously invested in military goals had become available to the development of NSW.
Macquarie had concluded by 1820 that NSW must grow beyond its gaol function into agricultural and pastoral pursuits, and he sought to open the colony up to settlement.
Commissioner John Bigge, reporting to the government in London in 1822 and 1823, proposed that large estates be granted or sold to men with the financial ability to run them as farms staffed by convict labor.
Grantees were to be men of "substance", not convicts or emancipists, and intending and able to develop productive farm properties which would underlie the development of a strong economic base for NSW. Some would be ex-military, others successful merchants or professional men.
The Hunter Valley was to be integral to this vision. Quickly, it was surveyed by Henry Dangar, working under colonial surveyor Sir Thomas Mitchell and focusing on the fertile alluvial floodplains of the Hunter River and its tributaries.
A few settlers like William Dun and James Webber in the lower Paterson valley and Edward Charles Close in the area that became Morpeth took up land even before the survey had begun. Their claims were incorporated later in Dangar's survey.
It was stipulated that no grant could be larger than 2560 acres (4 square miles) or have more than a mile of river frontage. Grantees were to be provided with one convict per 100 acres of grant. They could, if they wished, purchase additional land from the government.
Dangar used watercourses as natural boundaries but otherwise created a rigid grid pattern of rectangularly-shaped holdings oriented away from them.
Provision was also made for land to be allocated to church and school uses.
By the end of 1823, 36 holdings had been granted between Newcastle and Patricks Plains (later Singleton). By 1828 there were 191 grantees in the Hunter holding estates of at least 1000 acres.
The settlers (and those absentees whose holdings were run by overseers) put their assigned convicts to work clearing the land and establishing farms.
By 1828 there were more than 1800 convict males in the valley.
Thus was the Hunter population created that would support the nascent town of Maitland, soon to become the largest town in NSW outside Sydney.
