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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 7 (November 1, 1933)

In Infant Auckland

In Infant Auckland.

But Motu-korea and the pigs with which the Maoris stocked it for the pakehas did not hold page 20 page 21 Campbell and Brown long. Immediately this tented town was founded, they paddled up in their canoe and established themselves as settlers and traders. They bought a section facing Shortland Street, then just a track in the manuka scrub, and so began the new life that made them wealthy merchants under the style of Brown and Campbell. A humble beginning to a great career was Campbell's first year in the baby capital. The story of his rise to prosperity and fame is practically the story of Auckland. He had a hand in every important public service and was one of the chief founders of several great commercial and financial institutions, among them the Bank of New Zealand and the New Zealand Insurance Company. His firm owned ships, both sail and steam, and carried on a large export trade in kauri timber from the Kaipara. He bought land, and the first large purchase he made was the now famous Maunga-kiekie.

What memories must have come to him when in his last years he drove over the slopes of the great park that will memorise for all time his generous patriotism and gazed upon the thickly populated isthmus, practically one continuous city from the Waitemata to the Manukau, that within his own recollection was quite unpeopled except for a few Maori hapus on the shores! He saw Auckland built up from nothing to a city of a hundred thousand people, and no man helped more materially in this building than he. His services were not merely parochial or provincial. That he had the prophetic soul of the true statesman was more abundantly manifest in his writings and his public utterances.