Alberton - Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga

This guide to Alberton in Auckland follows Allan Kerr Taylor, who arrived from India at seventeen and bought his first acres here in eighteen forty-nine, growing a farmhouse into an eighteen-room mansion with ogee-shaped towers echoing the architecture of his childhood. It traces the death of his first wife Patty in her twenties, his remarriage within a year to seventeen-year-old Sophia, and the county ball that filled this lawn with more than two hundred and fifty guests in 1877. Look at those towers as you approach, nothing like the farmhouses of the Yorkshire settlers who built the rest of the district.