Kiwifruit industry in New Zealand and Growers, who were calling the berries "melonettes", because the local name for the fruit, "Chinese gooseberry", had political connotations due to the Cold War, and to further distinguish it from real gooseberries, which are prone to a fungus called anthracnose. An American importer, Norman Sondag of San Francisco, complained that "melonettes" was as bad as "Chinese gooseberry" because melons and berries were both subject to high import tariffs, and instead asked for a short Maori name that quickly connoted New Zealand. In June 1959, during a meeting of Turners and Growers management in Auckland, Jack Turner suggested the name
Gooseberry River 1870s, when commercial fishers moved into the north shore region. Loggers followed in the 1890s. In July 1899, Colonel John H. Knight and former Senator of Wisconsin William Freeman Vilas, owners of the Superior Lumber Company, acquired for $1,000,000 land around the Gooseberry River estimated to contain four hundred million feet of standing pine. Logs felled from the forests around the Gooseberry were rafted to Knight and Vilas's lumber mills in Ashland, Wisconsin. One year later, these lands were acquired, along with Knight and Vilas's Ashland mill, by Thomas Nestor of the Nestor Logging Company for $1,250,000. The Nestor Logging