Samuel was born at Kerikeri on 13 August 1824 — in the Mission House adjacent to the falls, the oldest surviving wooden building in New Zealand's North Island. He grew up in the same household as his brother George Junior, absorbing the same languages, the same Ngāpuhi neighbours, the same frontier practicality.
At ten years old, Samuel was sent to England in company with two other Bay of Islands boys — the future Judge E.M. Williams and Henry Kemp — under the care of a returning missionary, aboard HMS Buffalo (which was later wrecked at Mercury Bay). He spent seven years in England before returning to Auckland in 1844, becoming a pioneer settler at Waipuna on the Tamaki — near what is now Panmure. In the 1840s he purchased the Wymondley estate at East Tamaki, which he farmed in partnership with a man named Ludbrook (whose name he carried as his own middle name). The partnership was formally dissolved in 1857.
In 1857 he married Mary Lee Christopher at her mother's school on Queen Street, Auckland — a woman from Norfolk, as his parents had been, born at Thetford in the same county that had given George Clarke to the world. They moved to Tauranga in 1860, farming first on the old Church Mission property at Te Papa and later on his own land. He was among the first to use a plough in the Tauranga district.
When the Land Wars came to the Bay of Plenty in 1864, it was Samuel's gate — a large swing gate at the end of his farm, erected to provide a proper thoroughfare — that the Māori defenders incorporated into their fortification. It gave Gate Pā its name, one of the most celebrated engagements of the New Zealand Wars. Samuel and his family were obliged to leave during the fighting, sheltering in Poverty Bay.
After the war he returned to Tauranga, built "Top Croft" in 1870, and became a prominent figure in the district's civic life — magistrate, Chairman of the County Council, Chairman of the Road Board, and long-serving chairman of the Tauranga School Committee. In later years he retired to Otahuhu, to end his days near where his early farming career had begun. He died there on 15 March 1897.
His obituary in the New Zealand Herald noted simply that his life "really forms part of N.Z. history."