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From issue: Spring 2002

Legacy Set in Concrete

by Penelope Carroll

Warkworth's old cement works are about to pass into public ownership and nearby historic concrete houses are in good hands.

Dramatic riverside ruins, a house straight out of Sleeping Beauty and a stately home fit for Miss Haversham from Great Expectations are all part of the Warkworth heritage left by the family of Nathaniel and Florence Wilson.

The brooding ruins of the old cement and limeworks at Warkworth. Picture: Ian Anderson

The brooding ruins of the old lime and cement works on the banks of the Mahurangi River - the closest thing in New Zealand to Europe's ruined abbeys and castles - are among the most important industrial archaeological sites in the country.

From his first kiln built in 1866, Nathaniel Wilson, with brothers James and John, expanded the fledgling Warkworth business into a large conglomeration of kilns, boilerhouses and chimneys, producing the lime and cement that went into many landmark structures and buildings throughout New Zealand and Australia.

The Manager's House shortly after it was built in 1904. Photo: Warkworth & District Museum Society Inc

Cement production was phased out from 1918 after a company merger and all work stopped on the site in 1928. But, in the company's heyday a century ago, 180 men worked shifts quarrying and crushing limestone which was then mixed with clay, fired at a high temperature and ground into the fine powder of Portland cement.

As befits a prosperous man, Nathaniel - cobbler, gold miner and farmer before he founded his lime and cement business - built a stately family hilltop home above the cement works. Two-storeyed Riverina enjoys 360-degree views of the countryside and the winding lower reaches of the Mahurangi River - but not the cement works. On a clear day, Nathaniel would have gazed out to Kawau Island and Little Barrier Island.

Riverina suffered rough treatment before the current restoration. Picture: Piko Co-operative

Designed by Robert Wladislas de Montalk and completed in 1901, Riverina was built from rammed fired clay - not the cement that was the source of Nathaniel's prosperity. However, two flats built across the road in 1903 and the Manager's House (now Wilson House) built on the hillside behind the cement works the following year were constructed in concrete. These complete what Beverley Simmons, owner of Riverina and the flats (Little Riverina), calls the "Wilson trilogy."

It was not the ravages of time, wind and rain that reduced the cement works to ruins so speedily. The local Home Guard carried out a demolition exercise during the Second World War, assisted by American forces. Concerns for public safety, and the removal of bricks and concrete by the local council for road fill, caused further destruction.

Wilson House in the 1970s, a veritable Sleeping Beauty waiting to be rescued- Photo: NZ Herald

When Warkworth residents Neil and Diane Dixon bought the land and ruins 25 years ago, the site was a popular spot for picnicking, exploring the ruins and swimming in the deep, water-filled quarry hole. It still is although these days there's a gate charge to enter the grounds.

Neil Dixon, whose great-grandfather served on the Rodney Roads Board at the same time as Nathaniel Wilson, says the cement works and surrounding land were kept open to the public in response to requests from locals and the Rodney County Council.

Wilson House as it is today.

Now the ruins are about to pass into public ownership, thanks partly to the generosity of Warkworth resident and member of the Wilson family Vida Wilson, who donated a substantial portion of the purchase price to the council.
Whether the ruins and the adjoining lake and land will become a reserve has yet to be sorted out, says the council's property manager, Paul White. "Our primary objective has been to retain the historic structures. I expect a submissions process of some sort and a management plan to be put in place."

Simmons, who has either lived or holidayed in the area all her life, is pleased with the outcome. She and her late husband, Ron, bought Riverina in 1969. The couple saw it on New Year's Day and declared it was "love at first sight."
" It was abandoned and derelict. It hadn't been lived in for two years except as a love-in place," she says.

Before that, Riverina had suffered rough treatment. Passing out of Wilson family hands in 1938, it was used over the next 30 years by a succession of owners and occupiers, including road construction workers. American Army officers used it as a base during the war.

"One of the front rooms was full of pipes and metal belonging to a drain layer who used it for storage, " says Simmons. "Another was full of dead sheep. It had been used as a killing room."

Riverina became the Simmons' holiday hobby house - and an expensive hobby at that. Steel piles had to be driven into the ground and walls tied through with steel rods.

The rammed fired-clay external walls, extremely permeable once moisture gets in, needed to be waterproofed. The clay was originally dug from a paddock opposite the house and burned in a fire of puriri logs, then mixed with lime and rammed between a formwork. The walls were strengthened with steel mesh, cement plastered on the outside and solid plastered inside.

The Simmons replaced the steep roof, and the verandahs on both levels of the house. Upstairs walls and ceilings were replastered and repainted and amenities upgraded.

Now the house is solid except where downstairs floorboards are rotting. Very little has been done downstairs, says Beverley Simmons. It's a question of money.

Simmons has strong family ties with Warkworth. From the age of five, she was "printer's devil" for her grandfather, William Cook, who owned the Rodney Times from 1918.
Her husband having died in 1984, she moved from Auckland to live at Riverina in 1987 and became a farmer. She's given Riverina the best years of her life, she says.

Down the road from Riverina, perched above the cement works, is Wilson House, once derelict, blackened and roofless. Smothered in vines and thought to be haunted, it had by the 1960s become a veritable Sleeping Beauty house waiting to be rescued.

Built as the works manager's house, the building was at various times home for three of Nathaniel's sons and their families. William was the first occupant, followed by Tom in 1911 and finally Jim. During the deadly 1918 influenza epidemic, the house was set up as a hospital to take the overflow of patients from the local Warkworth hospital.
Wrote Tom in his memoirs: "It was very comfortable until the East wind began to blow. This drove the dust from the kiln chimneys right over the building and if there was a door or window open the dust permeated the whole house, making endless work after every gale."

By the time Marion and Daryl Percasky bought Wilson House in 1979, the building had been vacant for nearly 50 years. All the doors and windows were gone. The restoration project was daunting but the Percaskys liked the setting and the idea of saving the old house.

It took the Percaskys a year to strip all the undergrowth from in and around the structure and another to make the house habitable. Doors and windows were found, the roof was replaced with new tiles and slime and soot water were blasted off the walls. (The thieves who stole hams from the local butcher and smoked them in the deserted house were apparently responsible for the blackened appearance.)
Much of the Marseilles-tiled roof was still there - but lying on the kitchen, lounge and dining room floors.

According to Tom Wilson's memoirs, the roof was initially damaged in the 1920s when old cast iron was being broken up for scrap at the cement works below. "One charge was evidently too strong," he wrote, "for a fair-sized piece of casing flew so far afield that it fell into the roof of the Manager's House, smashing through the tiles and falling onto the floor. Fortunately no one was hurt."

Its current owners, Christa and Brian Melville, also loved the setting of the renamed Wilson House. In 1996, they gave up jobs in Auckland and moved in, deciding to run the property as a bed and breakfast, and as a romantic wedding venue. For the past four years, it has also been a gallery for imported tapestries, reproductions of well-known works of art screen-printed on canvas and Christa Melville's own paintings.

The idea of tapestries came about because of the great expanses of bare concrete walls and looming 4.2-metre stud. Unable to find anything suitable in New Zealand, Melville contacted tapestry makers in France, Belgium and Italy.
Now every room of Wilson House is hung with tapestries, covering 800 years of tapestry styles. Visitors come to buy or simply to look at the house. "We recognise it has historical significance so we always welcome people. A lot knew the house when it was derelict. They tell us stories about it and give us photographs, which is wonderful."

And is it haunted? Melville thinks so. She recalls waking one night to see a man dressed in workingman's clothes of a century ago standing in the doorway. Deciding that, ghost or real, either way she was in trouble, she hid under the bedclothes and was thankful to find no one there when she finally ventured out. "Often people who stay will ask 'is there a presence here?' Whoever it is, is quite friendly..."

Penelope Carroll is a writer and researcher based in Coromandel and Auckland.

Riverina and Wilson House are registered as Category II historic places. The Cement Works is registered as a Category I historic place.

Portland Cement was imported into New Zealand from the 1840s. Invermay, built as a farmhouse near Mosgiel in 1862 and now used as living quarters for researchers from the University of Oatgo, is thought to be the oldest concrete building still in use.