The Waipoua Forest was bought from Maori in 1876 for a little over 2 thousand pounds. At the time it covered approximately 80 square kilometres (31 sq mi). In 1885 the Waipoua Forest came under the provision of the State Forests Act, and an area of 90 km2 was constituted a State Forest Reserve. One of the reasons for its escape from destruction in earlier days was its remoteness combined with the difficulty of extracting its timber. Another was, that like the Warawara to the North, rainfall was more consistent and abundant so that Maori and European fires had not engulfed it (as happened to the Kaihu, Puhipuhi and large parts of the Coromandel forest in the 1870s and 1880s).
In 1907 the Waipoua Forest, the Warawara forest and one or two other smaller reserves were the only virgin kauri forests left belonging to the state. In 1913 a Royal Commission on Forestry recommended that a specially selected area of 0.8 square kilometres (0.31 sq mi) of the Waipoua forest, and the whole of the Warawara Forest of 50 square kilometres (19 sq mi), be established as national kauri forests for the people of New Zealand. In 1926 a road was put through Waipoua Forest with the purpose of providing an approach to the lands of neighboring settlers.
In the 1940s it became known that the State Forest Service was cutting kauri at Waipoua. In 1947 the Whangarei Progressive Society, in association with the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, the Waipoua Preservation Society, and other organizations secured 50,000 signatures to Parliament in a wheelbarrow. Its hope was that 160 square kilometres (62 sq mi) at Waipoua should be set aside for all time, inviolate from interference by man. Other petitions followed, and on 2 July 1952 an area of over 80 square kilometres (31 sq mi) was proclaimed a forest sanctuary. The zoologist William Roy Mc Gregor was one of the driving forces in this movement, writing an 80-page illustrated pamphlet on the subject, which proved
