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A year’s worth of celebrations marking the settlement of Warkworth will culminate with two major events this month, on Saturday November 11 and Saturday November 18.
The celebrations, which have umbrellaed several local milestones such as the bowling club’s centenary and the brass band’s 140th year, have been coordinated by Heritage Mahurangi, a group that formed just two years ago.
Heritage chair Dave Parker hopes the celebrations will spark some curiosity among young people to learn more about the town’s history.
He said last month’s Mahurangi school reunion had attracted around 200 former pupils, but all from the 1900s.
“There were no representatives from 2000 onwards, which makes me worry that young people today aren’t valuing their history and their place in it,” Parker says. “They just don’t seem interested and yet, acknowledging the work of our forefathers and understanding your heritage is so important.”
Major sponsors of the celebrations are G.J. Gardner Homes and Mason Containers.
Alastair Mason says that as fourth and fifth descendants of the Warkworth and the surrounding area, the principals of Mason Containers believe it is important that the town remembers and respects the heritage that has created “the unique community we are today”.
“This heritage, coupled with the vision and values of our forebears, will continue to influence the growth, integrity and uniqueness of our area so it is not lost in the continued city sprawl,” Mason says.
A special focus of the celebrations this month will be on the presence of thousands of US servicemen who camped in the area during World War II.
What are we celebrating?
The 170th anniversary marks the birth of the town of Warkworth rather than its settlement by Europeans, which started many years prior.
According to a Historical Report by Barry Rigby, commissioned by the Waitangi Tribunal in 1998, Mahurangi became important to the Crown in 1840 when Captain William Hobson decided to move his colonial capital southward from the Bay of Islands. Subsequently, the Crown came to treat Mahurangi as the gateway to Auckland.
Hobson sent surveyor general Felton Mathew to reconnoitre the northern approaches to it. In his June 1840 report, Mathew praised the sheltered nature of Mahurangi Harbour, and the ‘profusion’ of kauri on both sides of it. He thought it was ‘admirably adapted for the site of a town’. He added:
Several Europeans lay claim … to this portion of the country, but their titles, I am informed, are of no value. And even among the [unidentified] native chiefs a dispute exists as to the rights of ownership. The Government should therefore have no difficulty in taking possession of it. I did not see the slightest trace of native inhabitants during the time I was in the place.
The Mahurangi area was defined in the original 1841 Crown purchase as extending from the North Shore to Te Arai Point. Around this time, the Northumberland-born John Anderson Brown arrived in the Bay of Islands from Tasmania and then moved to Auckland.
In 1843, he travelled to the Mahurangi in a whale boat with a Maori crew and was one of the first to take up a land licence to cut timber.
The licences sold for £5 pound per annum.
As a timber merchant and builder, Brown was able to recognise a “good site” in the words of Felton Mathew, and he found it at the very limit of the navigable waterway. Taking advantage of all its qualities, harnessing the stream, building a dam, race and mill, he established Warkworth’s first industry. The timber mill was situated on the left bank, just below the present bridge. By 1845, according to the Auckland Police Census, the population of Warkworth consisted of 30 males – all employed at the mill.
The New Zealand Gazette of 1853, gives a description of the mill by a traveller from Sydney, who admired the fine machinery – much of it made from wood.
Charles Heaphy completed the long awaited and eagerly anticipated survey of the Mahurangi in 1852, and in 1853, Brown purchased 153 acres from the Crown at auction, including Lot 67, for £68/17, where the town now stands.
Brown, who named Warkworth, became a father figure for the new settlement. He established the first flour mill and built his home where the Bridgehouse Lodge now stands. He was the town’s first postmaster, first constable and chairman of the Mahurangi Highway Board, and he gave land for the establishment of an Anglican Church. John Brown died in 1867 aged 66.
(Sources, Historical Report by Barry Rigby, John Anderson Brown by Christine McClean and Heritage Mahurangi chair Dave Parker)
