John Campbell Stuart, the founder of Stuarts Point, was born in Grenoch on the Clyde River in Scotland in 1809.

One of three children - two boys and a girl - his parents died when Stuart was a boy and the youngsters were sent to live with their elderly grandmother in Nova Scotia.

The two boys, John Campbell and Isaiah, soon came under the care of Colonel Kaleb Smith, their grandmother’s brother and a wealthy merchant in his own right.

He raised the two boys as his own, educating and training them, John Campbell as a shipwright and Isaiah as a sail maker.

John Campbell came to Australia in the late 1840s or early 1850s.

His great grandson and resident expert on John Campbell, Clyde Piggott, said his grandfather had suffered a personal tragedy just before emigrating, pos- sibly the death of his first wife.

“He was definitely married in Nova Scotia. On his wedding certificate (for his second marriage) it described him as a ‘widower’,” Mr Piggot said .

“My thought is after the death of his wife he decided to shoot through.”

John Campbell settled in Sydney and built ships at Balmain, Parramatta and on the Hawkesbury River.

He remarried in 1857 in Churchill, Sydney, and soon after moved to the mouth of the Macleay River and established a ship yard.

It was here the majority of his 10 children were born.

While at Stuarts Point he built the ship Arakoon and the paddle steamer Fire King.

“It used to do the run from the mouth of the Macleay to Kempsey,” Clyde said.

“There’s a pic of the Fire King at McDonalds (in Kempsey) in front of where the RSL now is.”

While John Campbell may not have been the first settler at Stuarts Point, he certainly created interest and employment in the area, leading to the establishment of the village.

In the late 1860s he moved his family north to Nambucca where they eventually settled on Stuarts Island.

The main reason behind the move was access to timber, and John Campbell wasted no time in establishing mills and a new ship yard.

It proved to be a master stroke.

In the early 1870s he would build what would eventually prove to be his piece-de-resistance - the Royal Tar.

“The keel for the Royal Tar was laid in 1872 or 73 and she first sailed in 1876,” Mr Piggott said.

In commission the ship went to work in the Pacific, trading between Japan and America.

It would remain the largest colonial-built ship up to the end of the 19th century.

The ship was also involved in one of the most bizarre emigrations ever seen in Australia.

In 1892 it was purchased by a group of socialist utopians known as the ‘New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association’, and sailed from Sydney in July, 1893 with 241 members of the association aboard to settle a 450,000 acre property in Paraguay.

Founded in 1892 by a social reformer from the Queensland Labor movement, William Lane, the association members moved to South America to settle on a land grant from the Paraguayan Government, where a pure form of communism was to be practised.

The Tar was the most famous of the ships built by John Campbell Stuart at Nambucca with the Energy, a three-masted schooner built on Energy Point and later wrecked at Wooden Head, the Korora and the Pelican, which for a time operated as a tug on the Macleay, among his other notable successes.

John Campbell died on Stuarts Island in 1885 and was buried in Blackbutt Cemetery.

“He was placed on a steam punt which proceeded up the river to the cemetery,” Mr Piggott said.

“The mourners followed in their funeral procession, one boat behind the other.”

Mr Piggott described his great grandfather as a “big man, who spoke only when necessary”.

“He was also a very religious man. He would hold a divine service every week,” he said.

“When he passed away a letter was accidentally found in his drawer by his wife.

“It set out his share to his uncle’s fortune, but John Campbell didn’t want a part of it.

“It was his belief that unless you earned something, you didn’t deserve it.”