Although today the site of recent suburban residential, retail, and recreational developments, the transitional area where mainland meets the marshes and tidal creeks south of...
Driving south along Abercorn Street is something akin to a midcentury history lesson. Abercorn Park (1949) on 60th Street east of Abercorn features over thirty houses. Lamara Heights (1949) between Habersham...
By the 1950s, when Derenne Avenue was the southern boundary of Savannah, the area to the south and east of White-bluff Road (the extension of Bull...
The oldest of the inhabited islands, emerging from the ocean some five million years ago, Kauai is also the northernmost populated island. It is the fourth-largest island, covering 552.3 square miles. The now inactive volcanic shield which formed the island is the dominant landform and reaches...
Waimea was one of the population centers for Kauai during the period prior to contact with the remainder of the world. Situated on the dry leeward side of the island, the royal court came here during Hawaii's wetter winter months. In the years following Captain James Cook's arrival, it became...
Straddling the Hanapepe River, the east and west sides of Hanapepe town are connected by a single-lane bridge with an elevated pedestrian sidewalk (1911). Originally, a rather substantial Hawaiian settlement resided in this area thanks to the fertile, well-irrigated, flat valley floor, which...
Archaeological evidence indicates that Koloa was a heavily populated and farmed area prior to Western contact. The area's modern history began in 1835 when Ladd and Company established a sugar plantation here. In addition, Koloa's landing became the busiest on the island, provisioning ships...
Once a Hawaiian fishing area, Poipu's four-mile stretch of dry, sunny coastline remained virtually ignored for most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with only local residents maintaining beach cottages along the shore. The construction and then conversion of the Prince Kuhio, a...
The county seat for the island of Kauai, Lihue developed as a town in the twentieth century. There was no community on this site in the nineteenth century. However, the surrounding area was well populated with villages in nearly all the valleys, and both Lihue Plantation (...
For many years Wailua was the seat of power for the island of Kauai, and it was not until after the arrival of foreign ships that the ruling center for the island moved to Waimea. An ahupua‘a (traditional land division) running from the mountains to the ocean, Wailua's upland...
Kilauea Sugar Plantation was established in 1877 and operated for almost a century, shutting down in 1971, as it was not cost effective to reengineer it to meet federal Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Most of the plantation houses have been demolished following their acquisition...
A nine-thousand-acre, master-planned destination resort, Princeville includes one hotel, golf and tennis facilities, a commercial area, community park, public library, fire station, police station, and numerous luxury homes and town houses. In the nineteenth century, the lands were...
Accessed by a one-lane bridge, the Hanalei valley was one of the major taro-growing areas on Kauai, but many of the loiwere converted to rice production by the Chinese in the late nineteenth century. With the decline of rice in the 1920s, taro cultivation was revived and...
Oahu, the state's third-largest island, is 597.1 square miles in area, comprises 9 percent of the state's land, and holds more than 72 percent of its population, 876,156 in 2000. The city and county of Honolulu encompass the entire island, making it the twelfth-largest city in the United States in...
Honolulu is the capital of Hawaii and, unlike many state capitals, also is the state's center for business and finance, as well as population. As the political and economic hub of the state, Honolulu features a large variety of buildings from a full range of historical periods...
Located on the windward side of Oahu, the development of much of these two towns was undertaken by Kaneohe Ranch, whose president was Harold Castle. At the time of Castle's death in 1966, the ranch controlled twelve thousand acres located between Waimanalo and Kaneohe. This land...
Now a community of a little over 4,500 people, Laie was a sparsely populated Hawaiian village in the early nineteenth century. In 1865, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) acquired six thousand acres in the area and developed a relatively unsuccessful sugar plantation here. The...
Originally an extensive ancient Hawaiian settlement, Haleiwa's initial foreign residents were the Emersons, missionaries who arrived in 1832, to establish the third American mission station on the island. The area remained primarily a fishing village until the arrival of the railway in 1899,...
Mililani is a 3.9-square-mile master-planned community with a population of 28,608 in 2000. Located near the center of Oahu, it sits on former plantation lands owned by Castle and Cooke, who began planning this residential area in the early 1960s. The first dwellings were sold in 1968. The...
Conceived as “the second city” for Oahu, Kapolei sprang up in the late 1980s on former pineapple and sugar cane lands owned by the Campbell estate. Planned as a second urban core for the island of Oahu, it currently boasts a population of approximately 40,000. However, efforts to make it a...
During much of the nineteenth century, the land now occupied by these three towns was dedicated to ranching and agriculture, with rice, taro, and sweet potato predominating. Pearl City was Honolulu's first planned suburban development, laid out by civil engineer C. H....
The second-largest island in the Hawaiian chain, covering 727.3 square miles, Maui was formed by two volcanic episodes. The older, west Maui mountains (1.3 million years old) and the dormant, 10,023-foot-high Haleakala (750,000 years old) are bridged by the central Maui isthmus. The major population...
Wailuku and Lahaina served as the two major royal centers for Maui prior to Western contact with the Islands. In 1832, Protestant missionaries established a station in Wailuku and, by midcentury, a sugar plantation had been established. As the sugar industry grew, so did Wailuku's...
A fourteen-hundred-acre, master-planned resort destination, Wailea was originally a portion of Ulupalakua Ranch's Pacific shoreline, an open grazing land littered with thorny kiawe trees. In 1957, Matson Navigation Company acquired this area from Ulupalakua Ranch. Although plans to convert the...
The oldest historic district in Hawaii, Lahaina was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1966, primarily for its associations with the period between 1819 and 1843 when the town discontinuously served as the capital of Hawaii and the overlapping period from 1830 to 1860 when it was a major...
The first master-planned destination resort in Hawaii, Kaanapali occupies twice the area of Waikiki and was designed to avoid the shortcomings of Honolulu's world famous beach. Fronting on a two-and-a-half-mile curving white sand beach, it is characterized by grand expanses of open space. A...
The origins of Paia as a community date to 1880 when Alexander and Baldwin established a sugar mill here. A company store opened in 1896, but it was not until 1905, with the construction of the present mill and the relocation of some of the Spreckelsville sugar operations to this area, that the...
As early as September 4, 1869, H. M. Whitney, editor of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, advised his readers that a journey by horse along the Hana coast was unforgettable thanks to its “paradisiacal” scenery that included steep precipices, frequent cascades,...
Upcountry Maui encompasses a broad area of forest, farmlands, and pastures that stretches across the western slopes of Haleakala from the cloud line down to about the 1,500-foot elevation. Running from the communities of Ulupalakua to Makawao, the rich soil and climate have always...
