The Corban Mausoleum is now the sixth heritage site published on Tohu Heritage, captured in photorealistic 3D.
It is the resting place of the family who shaped much of what West Auckland looks like today. Assid Abraham Corban arrived in New Zealand from Lebanon in 1892. Ten years later he bought ten acres in Henderson and planted a vineyard beside the Ōpanuku stream, trading as Mount Lebanon Vineyards. Within twenty years the family had built what would grow into the largest winery in the country.
What makes this site different is how it came to be documented.
A Founder’s Note
On a Saturday afternoon at Henderson’s Mill Cottage, I sat down with two people who have spent years keeping West Auckland’s history in reach: Fiona Drummond, Co-chairperson and Vice President of the West Auckland Historical Society, and Sharon Alexander Corban, a committee member and long-time contributor who gives talks on local heritage, including the Corban family legacy.
The society is not a large institution. It is a volunteer group and committee, run out of Mill Cottage in Henderson, holding a remarkable amount of local memory between them.
I went in expecting to learn about one building. I left realising how tightly everything is bound together.
The cottage we were sitting in is the oldest building still standing in Henderson. It began as the cookhouse for Thomas Henderson’s water-powered timber mill around 1849, became a schoolroom by 1875, then a family home. And in 1993 it was the A K and N A Corban Family Trusts who gifted that building to Waitakere City Council, so it could be moved downhill and saved.
So the room where I was being told the Corban family’s story was itself a gift from the Corban family, and the person telling much of it carries the name. The society that has kept the cottage standing since 1994 is the same society whose members were helping me understand the mausoleum that holds the family it came from.
That is the part I keep returning to. Heritage in West Auckland is not a set of separate buildings. It is one family’s decisions still holding up another generation’s memory, decades later, in a place most people drive past without knowing any of it.
You can explore the Corban Mausoleum now, and Henderson’s Mill Cottage alongside it.
