Stone Store (Kerikeri)
The Stone Store in Kerikeri in the Bay of Islands is New Zealand's oldest surviving stone building.
As part of the Church Missionary Society's first mission station in New Zealand, the warehouse was designed by John Hobbs to replace a previous wooden building. The building was constructed between 1832 and 1836 by the mason William Parrott, the carpenter Ben Nesbitt, and several Māori. The material used was sandstone from Australia, New Zealand volcanic rock and limestone mortar from burnt mussel shells. Iron connectors and window bars were forged by James Kemp. Originally the building had a wooden bell tower on one side. The material stone, which was unusual in New Zealand at the time, was chosen to keep rats away from the grain, to improve the defense against the Māori and to reduce the risk of fire.
The Stone Store was to serve as the base of a Church Missionary Society trading post, where agricultural products from the Te Waimate Mission were to be sold to ships and European goods to the Māori. Marsden planned to build a flour mill on the nearby Kerikeri River , but this was instead built in Waimate itself.
In the mid-1830s, the mission stations could no longer compete with the undertakings of other European settlers in trade and agriculture, so that the camp turned out to be uneconomical. The Stone Store was therefore converted into the Mission Library by Bishop Selwyn in the early 1840s. After Kororareka was sacked in the Flagstaff War , it was briefly used as a magazine and barracks by Governor George Edward Gray . After the end of the hostilities in 1845, the building was leased and the center of a trading company for kauri resin . In 1863 it housed a boys' school. In 1874 the building was sold to the Kemp family and operated as a general store. At the same time it gained importance as a tourist attraction. The Kemps sold the building to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust in 1975 . Restoration work was carried out in the 1990s. Together with the nearby Kerikeri Mission House , the Stone Store now houses a small museum.
The Stone Store was registered by NZHPT on June 23, 1983 under registration number 5 as a category 1 monument.
Web links
- Stone store. Historic Place Category 1. In: New Zealand Heritage List / Rārangi Kōrero . Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga , June 23, 1983, accessed September 25, 2019 .
Coordinates: 35 ° 13 ′ 4.4 ″ S , 173 ° 57 ′ 45.4 ″ E