Family documents ‘terrifically exciting’

Oamaru stone quarry at Totara circa 1890. PHOTOS: WAITAKI DISTRICT ARCHIVE

Oamaru stone blocks from Teschemaker’s quarry, at Clarks Mill, Maheno.

An unidentified North Otago quarry from the Oamaru Totara Tree Stone Company era.

Kathleen Perry and her late husband Keith kept a "box of family history stuff" discovered behind Oamaru’s Empire Hotel, which Keith had saved from the landfill years earlier. When it was donated to the Waitaki District Archive late last year, curator Chris Meech called the donation "magnificent". Hamish MacLean finds out more.

When Benjamin Perry moved from Dunedin to North Otago in 1879 he bought a farm in Springfield Rd, made distinctive by the large totara tree on the property.

Soon after, he learned the farm stood atop limestone of a remarkable quality and the Oamaru Totara Tree Stone Company was formed. A sprawling network of business relationships was established and the stone from his quarry, and quarries from the surrounds of Oamaru, was freighted through New Zealand and shipped around the globe.

And the Oamaru Totara Tree Stone Company kept a record of it all.

A century on, Mr Perry’s descendants still live in the area, now known as Totara, south of Oamaru.

And thanks to the late Keith Perry and his wife Kathleen, complete records of a major player in Oamaru’s signature industry are now housed at the Waitaki District Archive.

For years Kathleen Perry stored what she knew to be family history at home. She later learned the records were a complete history of the Oamaru Totara Tree Stone Company and offered new insight into the workings of one of Oamaru’s most important early industries. Photos Hamish MacLean

Curator Chris Meech said the Perry family donation was "terrifically exciting". It represented about 2m of shelf space at the archive; the "pretty complete record for a 19th-century business" were complemented by records from Benjamin Perry’s Empire Hotel, in Thames St, where the collection was recovered by the Perrys, and the records of George Sumpter and Son Auctioneers, which also used to operate from the premises.

Mr Meech said after the donation was made late last year, a cursory, or "bundle-level", cataloguing began, and although the records would require an in-depth scholarly review, the initial review of the documents had proved their value.

"It’s the story of people’s reaction to the environment and turning a profit from the resources of the district," he said.

"This is magnificent. We’ve known all of these amazing whitestone buildings, not just in Oamaru but throughout the country, we’ve known they were probably Oamaru stone.

"These records let us say from which quarry they’ve come — that’s a pretty strong geological linking.

"There’s a web of relationships — and not just New Zealand, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, San Francisco ... and we haven’t even opened a lot of these bundles to see what’s going on.

Amy Perry (12), of Totara, reads an 1882 letter from her great-great-great grandfather Benjamin Perry’s business at the Waitaki District Archives.

"They’re just waiting for someone to come along and do a bit more research, take them to the next level, go through and analyse them at the letter level, begin to identify buildings off them," he said.

The history of the industry in the area was previously best known through newspaper records, Mr Meech said, but this donation provided a more direct connection with the history. The Empire Hotel, now a backpackers, was filled in those days with semi-permanent lodgers; every item it sold was recorded in a large ledger now stored in the archive.

(On August 29, 1896, the hotel sold 12 small glasses of rum.) In the 1890s, the Oamaru Totara Tree Stone Company lobbied against railway tariffs for stone — and perhaps the matter was discussed in some of the correspondence included in the company’s records, he said.

Waitaki District Archive curator of archives Chris Meech inspects a piece from the Perry family donation at the archives.

When the old bait stable in Humber St, at the rear of the Empire Hotel, was dismantled in the early 1970s, Kathleen Perry recalled "Keith came home to me and he said ‘There’s a whole lot of family history there that I would like to keep’".

"It was a huge amount of stuff," Mrs Perry said.

"I had no idea it was so valuable."

Family friend and local historian Shona Paton had spoken with her husband about it.

But it was later on, when the Perry family collection came to the attention of an Australian historian — who wanted to see if she could trace the stone in Melbourne’s buildings back to Oamaru — that it was seen for what it was.

"She went through it and said there’s some family history here that you really need to keep," Mrs Perry said.

"It does need to be somewhere safe."