Maori called it Mokoia and if you go there today, it is obvious why it would have been the central business district of its day. It is the point where the Tamaki inlet narrows to be no wider than a river.
The inlet was the motorway of that time, the main route from north of Auckland to Waikato. With a short portage to the Manukau Harbour at Otahuhu and another from the south-reaching arm of the Manukau to the Waikato River, waka could travel all the way to Taupo.
Nothing would have passed Panmure without stopping to pay dues or at least respects, and no doubt to enjoy some hospitality and trade. It would have been a lively, prosperous Maori town.
I wonder if that heritage can inspire the urban regeneration project announced this week for Panmure, Pt England and Glen Innes.
Those places, with their eastern coastal blessings, should be among the grandest parts of Auckland. Look north from the summit of Mt Wellington on a sunny day and the suburbs below seem fine, with plenty of green space and the sea nearby.
The University of Auckland's detached campus looks so pleasant you wonder that the whole university hasn't moved out here.
The area has everything going for it. A railway line comes right past, courtesy of long dead designers who inexplicably decided the North Island main trunk should loop east from Otahuhu and come into Auckland across Hobson Bay.
The rail has brought so much industry to Mt Wellington that there must be plenty of local employment. So how did so much of that eastern side of Auckland become an urban backwater?
The answer, I suppose, is obvious: state rental housing. Last century's social projects have sorry legacies in other places too.
The Tamaki redevelopment plan jointly launched by Housing Minister Nick Smith and Mayor Len Brown this week is another attempt to design a more successful social environment.
To this end, Housing NZ and the Auckland Council set up a company last year. Its blueprint was not enthusiastically received by the residents on Tuesday.
Smith obviously wants the Tamaki plan to be a poster project for the Government's solutions to Auckland house prices that haunt the economy at present.
The Government wants to believe high prices are largely caused by a shortage of houses and has put a gun to the head of the Auckland Council to produce quick building consents in designated development zones.
The zones need not necessarily fall inside the council's desired urban boundary but Tamaki does, so the council is happy to be a partner in the project.
The density of the area is to be doubled, adding 6000 houses but fewer than 1200 would be owner-occupied. The vast majority will again be state rentals. With community centres, pool and health clinics in the plan, it sounds like another of those modern "projects" that never work.
Tenants in the worst parts of Glen Innes have been waging a long war of resistance against Housing NZ plans to demolish and start again. Hone Harawira got arrested in one attempt to block the access to a house last year.
This week he produced his own solution to house prices, at least for Maori. He wants 10,000 houses built by Maori for Maori at public expense.
"Let them pay for it with Treaty money," replied radio callers yesterday. That is a possibility. Pre-colonial Tamaki was the territory of tribes that straddled the Hauraki Gulf. It remained in their possession when Ngati Whatua from Kaipara had conquered the rest of the isthmus, just a century before Europeans arrived.
Descendants of about 13 iwi who were on the isthmus at that time are waiting for a Treaty settlement.
When it comes it could revive a corner of Auckland to its former glory.
