The carpenter who built a city

Sir John Logan Campbell was one of the city's first entrepreneurs and benefactors. Photo / Auckland War Memorial Museum

To celebrate Auckland’s 175th anniversary, its demisemiseptcentennial, the Weekend Herald continues a series celebrating the growth of the city with a look at more uniquely Auckland icons. Today: Sir John Logan Campbell.

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In the tiny back room of Acacia Cottage - Auckland's oldest wooden building - hangs a framed letter with the fine penmanship of Sir John Logan Campbell.

The man hailed as the "Father of Auckland" was modest and meticulous and liked to keep the record straight when it came to tales of his noble deeds. The letter, dated 1885, was addressed to Alfred Horton, proprietor of the New Zealand Herald.

A story in the newspaper had claimed the cottage, one of the first to spring up in the new settlement of Auckland, was "built in kauri by Dr Campbell". But Campbell was at pains to stress he had merely helped his business partner and fellow Scotsman, William Brown, to erect Acacia Cottage in downtown Auckland's O'Connell St.

He did, however, admit to his handiwork inside the house: "the whole of the internal divisioning and fitting up was my work, during the winter nights of 1841 - the wind whistling through the rafters," he wrote.

By day, 24-year-old Campbell was building his considerable business empire - as a merchant, clerk, land agent, auctioneer, and even doctor and surgeon. By night, he toiled as a carpenter, with tools he brought out from Scotland in 1840, to make the well-ventilated cottage more habitable. Though Campbell had studied medicine in Edinburgh, he'd also done an apprenticeship in carpentry and had no wish to work as a doctor.

In his early years of helping to build Auckland, jack-of-all-trades Campbell drove himself to exhaustion, historian Professor Russell Stone says. But Campbell wrote in his memoir Poenamo that the slog paid off: "I look back with pride and pleasure to all I went through as a pioneer settler I fought the battle with a hard-working hand and a willing heart and, if the prize has been mine, I have earned it."

With pit-sawn kauri collected from Northland forests, the partners would build not only the cottage for Brown and his wife, Jessie, but also a two-storey store on their quarter-acre allotment in Shortland Crescent. Until then, their business operated from a tent pitched on the beachfront of Queen St.

Campbell soon moved into the Browns' modest cottage too - a boarder in the back room - after his tent was destroyed in a gale.

Today, 174-year-old Acacia Cottage stands in Cornwall Park, the land Campbell generously gifted to Auckland. The cottage has been faithfully restored since it was moved to the park in 1920; it is open to the public every day and 10,000 people a month wander through the cottage's wood-panelled rooms and marvel at the carpentry skills of two determined young men who'd trained as a doctor and a lawyer but were the city's first entrepreneurs.

The plateau behind Acacia Cottage was to have been the site of a palatial family home for Campbell, his wife Emma and their two daughters. But it was too far from town for Mrs Campbell so he bought a bleak 2ha block of land above Judge's Bay, Parnell.

Campbell had become one of Auckland's most successful businessmen, founder of the Auckland Savings Bank (ASB), which grew into one of the country's biggest financial institutions, and a respected public figure. When his stately Italianate mansion, Kilbryde, was completed in 1880 it was one of the city's most magnificent homes. But it stood for less than half a century - flattened to make way for the progress of a city he helped create.

Campbell had been seduced by the views over the sparkling Waitemata Harbour to his beloved Motukorea (Browns Island) - the island where he and Brown raised pigs and grew pumpkins in 1841 while they waited to buy land in downtown Auckland.

He named his new home after Kilbryde Castle, where his doctor father was born and raised in Perthshire, Scotland. The promontory where the Auckland house stood became Campbell's Point.

It was quite a step up from that simple cottage Campbell first helped build in O'Connell St. This mansion featured a music room with ornate candelabra and a minstrel's gallery, fresco paintings of Italian and Swiss landscapes and seating for 500. Among his many guests was American author Mark Twain.

Campbell cleared scrub to plant native and exotic trees on the clifftop; part of the garden remains today in the Parnell Rose Gardens.

After Campbell died there in 1912, and Lady Campbell passed away two months later, the house sat empty, until it was used as a fever hospital during the influenza epidemic in 1918. There was talk of turning the house into a museum celebrating the city's first colonists. But in 1924, just 43 years old, Kilbryde was controversially demolished - making room for the main trunk railway deviation and Tamaki Drive.

Campbell first laid eyes on the volcanic peak of Maungakiekie the day he arrived in Auckland in 1840 - as he and Brown walked from Orakei to Onehunga in a bid to buy land from Ngati Whatua chief Te Kawau. As they passed, Campbell dubbed the cone One Tree Hill, for the single tree on its summit.

Thirteen years later, Campbell and Brown bought 400ha of land around Maungakiekie for 16,500 in a mortgagee sale. When Brown and Campbell's partnership dissolved, Campbell became sole owner of the One Tree Hill estate.

After one of his two daughters died in 1880, Campbell drew up a bill bequeathing One Tree Hill to the people of Auckland as "Corinth Park". He was determined not to divide the farm into housing lots and leave "the Queen of Oceania park-less".

Campbell brought his plans forward, when news came of a visit from the Duke of Cornwall (later King George V). Agreeing to be Mayor of Auckland during the three-month visit, Campbell officially handed the 93ha park to his city in the presence of royalty, renaming the gift Cornwall Park in the Duke's honour, and declaring it "a place of public resort for the recreation and enjoyment of the people of New Zealand". Austin Strong, a step-grandson of Robert Louis Stevenson, asked to design the layout of the park.

Before he died in his 95th year, Campbell requested an obelisk, like those he'd seen in Egypt, be built on the summit - not as a memorial to himself but to recognise his admiration of the "great Maori race". Completed 28 years after his death, it stands guard over Campbell's burial tomb on top of Maungakiekie. Campbell's epitaph is simple: Si monumentum requiris circumspice - If you require a monument, look around you.

Logan Campbell in the avenue at Cornwall Park. Photo / Sir George Grey Special Collections

From primeval forest, by axe and canoe

"I sign this Deed of Gift on the 61st anniversary of the year I left the Maori village of Waiomu, on the shores of the Hauraki Gulf, and entered the primeval forest to carve with my axe the canoe in which afterwards I made my way to the Island of Motukorea, my first home in the Waitemata. Since that day it has been my fortune to be at the foundation of the colony of New Zealand, to watch with deepening interest and affection the growth of my adopted country, and to share as well its struggles and its vicissitudes and its now well-founded and increasing prosperity."

- From the document written by John Logan Campbell on June 10, 1901, which accompanied the Deed of Gift handing Cornwall Park to the people of New Zealand.

For strong men and invalids

Alcohol may have been the most prosperous and enduring of John Logan Campbell's businesses but it was far from his proudest achievement.

The Domain Brewery, which Campbell began with William Brown in Newmarket in 1848, kept him afloat during economic storms. But Professor Russell Stone wrote that Campbell was "ashamed of his new dependence on alcohol" as the liquor industry came under fire from prohibitionists in the 1890s.

Bottled water was big business. Photo / Auckland War Memorial Museum

Campbell's business lives on today as Lion Nathan.

But perhaps to counter-balance the brewing of beer and whisky, Campbell also touted a natural cure-all to those who had over-imbibed.

Bottled mineral water was big business in New Zealand at the end of the 19th century; its medicinal properties were hailed around the globe and, by 1918, there were more than 160 bottling plants throughout the country.

Campbell & Ehrenfried - Campbell's new company formed by merger in 1897 - bottled Puriri Natural Mineral Water, sourced from mineral springs on a farm in Puriri, near Thames. The water was high in sodium bicarbonate making it a natural antacid; for generations, Maori had used it for its therapeutic qualities.

The benefits of Puriri Natural Mineral Water were widely acclaimed, with international experts comparing it to the famous Vichy spa waters of France; at home, newspapers advertised its ability to help "the dyspeptic, the rheumatic, the gouty, and the obese." When added to whisky and brandy, it was peddled as a drink for "strong men and invalids".

Even Sir Robert Stout, New Zealand's 13th Premier and Chief Justice, was among the converted: "To anyone having a tendency to gout, I consider it invaluable."