Acker's Cottage is one of the first stone houses on

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

Stewart Island Stewart Island ( mi, Rakiura, ' glowing skies', officially Stewart Island / Rakiura) is New Zealand's third-largest island, located south of the South Island, across the Foveaux Strait. It is a roughly triangular island with a total land ar ...

. The cottage was placed on the

Heritage New Zealand Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga (initially the National Historic Places Trust and then, from 1963 to 2014, the New Zealand Historic Places Trust) ( mi, Pouhere Taonga) is a Crown entity with a membership of around 20,000 people that advocate ...

list of historic places (category I) and has been restored by Heritage New Zealand and the

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as an example of an early vernacular building. Built by Lewis Acker, it is the oldest whaling cottage in New Zealand and one of the earliest stone buildings on Stewart Island.

Lewis Acker

Lewis Acker (c.1817–11 July 1885) was a

whaler, boatbuilder, trader, farmer and saw miller. He was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, US. Acker married a Kai Tahu woman, Mary Pui, and together they had nine children. After Acker retired from whaling, he built the cottage on Harrold Bay, Stewart Island. He quarried the stone at

Oreti Beach Oreti Beach is the central bay of three lying on the Foveaux Strait coast of Southland, New Zealand, the others being Te Waewae Bay and Toetoes Bay. Twenty-six kilometres in length, the bay lies between the town of Riverton and the outflow of the ...

and carried it across

Foveaux Strait The Foveaux Strait, (, or , ) separates Stewart Island, New Zealand's third largest island, from the South Island. The strait is about 130 km long (from Ruapuke Island to Little Solander Island), and it widens (from 14 km at Ruapuk ...

in his boat. He cleared the nearby land for cultivation in an area that is now called Acker's Point. Acker and his wife lived in this cottage until the late 1850s. Since that time it has been used as a smithy, storeroom, brewery and workshop.

References

{{Use dmy dates, date=April 2017 Heritage New Zealand Category 1 historic places in Southland, New Zealand