It was founded in December 1938 by Henry Evans Maude, a British colonial officer, as one of the three villages established by the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme after the group were annexed into the Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony in 1937.
Butler's father, George Butler, was teaching practical agriculture to Gerald Gallagher on the farm at Maiden Hall when Gallagher applied for a position in the British colonial service, where he became the first officer-in-charge of the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme, the last colonial expansion of the British Empire.
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