Pompallier house

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Pompallier House, built and first occupied by French Roman Catholic missionaries of the Society of Mary, it has significant association with notable people and events that occurred within the history of New Zealand. Erected on a section of land with “70 feet frontage to the sea” and served as a mission printing house and later a residential home. French architect Louis Perret led the project and Pise de Terre was the primary method of construction. The building is said to been completed around August 1842 and is the oldest surviving building associated with the history of The Roman Catholic Church in New Zealand.

The printing house is named after Jean-Baptiste Pompallier, a French Bishop who led the founding Catholic mission in New Zealand. Bishop Pompallier established the headquarters of the French Catholic mission in Kororareka, later known as Russell in The Bay of Islands. Mission work appealed to him more and so he associated himself with priests who were engaged in the establishment for The Society of Mary, which was a society particularly interested in foreign missions. In January 1836, Pope Gregory XVI formally initiated the Vicariate of Western Pacific Oceania. The Church needed a young and vigorous man for the job and Father Pompallier was recommended to the Holy See. Bishop Pompallier and his men arrived at the Bay of Islands in 16th June 1839, and first obtained the land on 6th July 1839 from Benjamin Evans Turner, a grog seller with some standing in Kororareka at the time. “The bishop’s Kororareka purchase included a narrow, twenty-one meter, harbor frontage, but ran back across the beach flat and up the clay hill behind or nearly two hundred meters. The supervising architect Louis Perret arrived at the site along wi...

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... the name of a man very important in the Roman Catholic settlement and the overall New Zealand history. Pompallier house was sold to the New Zealand Government in 1943, and there was much debate about how the building should be restored. The original printing house had great historical significance to the country, yet Greenway’s renovations not only let it survive to this day, but also preserved the graceful representation of New Zealand architecture during the early years. The final decision was to maintain the current state, since the Pise de Terre construction by itself proved to be unsuccessful.(maroon 15). The past held many uncertainties when New Zealand first became a colonial nation,
The printing house turned residential home is not just a national symbol, but also reflects the adaptability and perseverance of a country through the life time of the building.

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