Kemp House and Stone Store - Kerikeri Mission Station

Sitting on the edge of the Kerikeri Basin, Kemp House, built by missionaries in 1821, is the country's oldest wooden dwelling, while the neighbouring old Stone Store, dating from 1833, is the country's oldest stone structure. The garden surrounding Kemp House is the oldest continuously cultivated garden in New Zealand. The road bridge which crossed the river next to the house and store has now been replaces with a major new highway built upstream. There is parking across the river and the historic area is now accessible from the north via a new pedestrian bridge.

KEMP HOUSE - History

The substantial two-storeyed home that’s long been known as Kemp House is the oldest surviving wooden house in New Zealand. It was built for the Rev John Butler of the Church Missionary Society at Kerikeri in 1821–1822. After the house had been occupied by the artisan missionary, George Clarke, from 1824 to 1831, James Kemp moved in. He was a blacksmith with this first mission to New Zealand.

The mission closed in 1848, but the Kemp family, who eventually bought the house from the missionary society, occupied it for 142 years – from 1832 to 1974. A descendant, Ernest Kemp, presented the house and its contents to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust in 1974. Kemp House was built by another artisan missionary, the carpenter and boatbuilder, William Hall, with kauri timber pit-sawn by local Maori trained for the job. Probably designed by Butler himself, the house was on a grand scale. This irked both Hall and Samuel Marsden, the leader of the mission. The style of Butler’s house was English Georgian vernacular (late eighteenth century) and very similar to Marsden’s own house at Parramatta in Sydney, Australia, but Marsden rebuked Butler for ‘this very large and unnecessary building [that] had been put up for him’. A grumbling Hall had complied with ‘Butler’s wishes’ and included the six-panelled front door, its semi-circular fanlight and the pilasters he requested.

The verandah, added around three sides, and some lean-to facilities at the back were adaptations to the colonial scene. Both the robustness and the elegance of Kemp House are notable. The carpenters of the day had little experience of all-wooden construction, yet Hall’s attention to detail, including beaded-edge weatherboards and window surrounds, indicates considerable skill with wood. Kauri proved to be an ideal timber for such detailed work.

The garden surrounding Kemp House is also notable as the oldest continuously cultivated European garden in New Zealand. Planned by Butler in 1820 while he waited for his house to be built, the entire garden was fenced. It contained numerous vegetable beds and fruit trees as well as outbuildings and stockyards for animals. The house and garden are open to visitors on all but Christmas Day.

STONE STORE - CMS white elephant

The Stone Store was New Zealand’s first architectural white elephant. Modelled, like the adjacent mission house, on Samuel Marsden’s establishment at Parramatta, in Sydney, the store testifies to the determination of Church Missionary Society (CMS) catechist, storekeeper and blacksmith, James Kemp, and his wife Charlotte, not to leave their comfortable nest at Kerikeri to further the work of the Society. They had arrived in 1819 and would linger here long after there was anyone to preach to, quietly laying up treasure on earth. The building’s impossible location, up a shallow creek and far from the shifting frontier of missionary endeavour, arose from infighting between the CMS’s Kerikeri and Paihia factions. ‘You may ask why, then, did we go to so great an expense in the erection of a building which is now condemned by the collected wisdom in New Zealand’, CMS leader, Henry Williams, wrote to his superior in 1835. He knew very well why. Marsden feared that whalers and traders would have more pulling power than preachers and backed Kemp precisely because this warehouse was far from temptation. Unfortunately it was also unhandily far from the seagoing ships needed to transport goods to and from its expensive door. Make no mistake, it was expensive. Lavishly built from local basalt, supplemented by Sydney sandstone in the arches, jambs and corners, the store must have looked jarringly out of place in a land where raupo whares were the norm and where even missionaries made do with timber. But wait, there was more. At a late stage in construction, someone stuck a structurally unsound belfry/clock tower on Kemp’s folly. It probably lasted less than a decade but it explained why early visitors frequently shook their heads at it towering over the chapel! The heavy window bars, built by Kemp himself, showed how much he feared his Maori overlords. In fact, Mr Kemp’s Folly has been underutilised during most of its long career as, off and on, a post office,store, kauri gum store, temporary boxing rink and polling booth. In 1975 the Historic Places Trust bought and leased it to a storekeeper who ran a dusty museum as a sideline. Its institutional life has been eventful. In 1981 debris dammed the swollen river at the nearby bridge, flooded Kemp House and sent water through part of the store. Two summers earlier, uncontaminated by historic research, the Trust had inserted inaccurate dormers and a structurally unsound chimney. The building almost succumbed to this evil concoction of unwise tampering, traffic vibration and dampness caused by rising ground levels. When the Trust closed it in 1992 for extensive conservation, parochial teeth gnashed and there were marches in the street but the store is now safe to enter. It sports proper dormers but this national icon is still threatened by traffic vibration and that — literally as well as metaphorically — dam bridge. The Stone Store stands at the head of the Kerikeri Basin, on the eastern coast of Northland.

Related places- The basin also contains Hongi Hika’s Kororipo Pa, Saint John’s Church, archaeological sites and historic trees.

Copyright 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Gavin McLean, No Continuing City, New Zealand Historic Places Trust, Wellington, 1994.

Kerikeri Stone Store by Jayne Maria Sprott