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.
Fascinating and well worth the excellent maintenance to keep this cottage in our NZ history!
What an entrepreneur this guy was, such a hard worker & it all paid off. Campbell was young but a man of all trades & talents, NZ was the better for having him!
As I have a good friend named Campbell, who went to Scotland and traced his genealogy, only to find that his predecessors were in fact horse thieves, I found this to be of great interest. My Campbell's house is only marginally larger!
