James Patrick was born in Scotland and came to Otago as a seven-year-old boy on the Philip Laing in 1848. He lived first in an area called ‘Little Paisley,’ now the site of Dunedin’s Southern Cemetery, until 1857 when his father bought 50 acres of land at Tomahawk. The Patrick family became the pioneer settlers there and their house was the first one to be built in the bush beyond the lagoons. Breaking in the land and transporting supplies from Dunedin was arduous work in which the teenage James and his younger siblings played a full part. In fact he was to spend the rest of his life at Tomahawk, taking over the family farm after his father’s death in 1897.
In 1879 James married Margaret Coulter. Together they would have eight children and become stalwarts of the Tomahawk district. James died there in 1920, aged 78.
Mr James Patrick junior