Vacation Rental in Princeville Kauai

and Kauai Travel Guide

©B.Pruitt 2009-2011

History of Kauai and Hawaii

People Come to Kauai

Strangers From a Strange Land

From Force and Might Come Unity

The Russian Affair

The End of Kapu

All God’s Children Must Go to Heaven

The Whalers Tale

Add Sugar To The Mix

Kauai Timeline

A Succession of Monarchs

Add Sugar To The Mix

Ladd and Company established the first successful and lasting sugar cane plantation in the Hawaiian Islands in 1835 in the south Kauai area of Koloa.  The three partners who founded Ladd and Company could not have been successful without the support of the missionaries.  In addition to saving souls, the missionaries desired to raise the desperate condition of the mass of Hawaiians and believed that farming was the way for them to do this.  The missionaries arranged for Ladd and Company to lease approximately 1,000 acres of land at Koloa and the waterfall at Maulili for a period of fifty years at $300 per year.  This was the first lease drawn in Hawaiian history and marked a revolutionary change in policy concerning the control of land.  Kamehameha III, Governor Kaiki'oewa of Kauai and the three partners of Ladd and Company signed the lease.  Stipulated in the lease was that the native laborers would be paid a satisfactory wage and be exempted from all taxation.  Taxation usually took the form of labor performed for the chiefs.  Payment of wages directly to the workers without obligations to their chiefs gave the common Hawaiians more independence—a concept not easily understood by the commoners and feared by the chiefs.

Plans for commercially growing and milling sugar in Lihu‘e began in 1849 when Henry A. Peirce of Boston bought between 2,000 and 3,000 acres of land between Nawiliwili Stream and Hanama‘ulu Stream.  Partnering with Peirce were Charles Reed Bishop, the founder of Bishop Bank, the forerunner of today's First Hawaiian Bank, and William L. Lee, chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Hawaiian Kingdom.  In 1853, the mill ground the first crop of 108 tons of cane.  In the early years of the plantation, teams of oxen were used to clear the land, 90 percent of which was covered with a forest of koa, hau, kukui and ahakea trees.  The plantation owners built their first mill next to a dam that provided the waterpower needed to drive the three-ton, ironbound, granite crushers imported from China.  By 1854, the mill's capacity increased to three tons per day while the investors spent five times their original capital to make the operation profitable.

In 1856-57, plantation manager and investor, William Harrison Rice, built the ten-mile Lihu‘e Ditch.  It was Hawaii's first large-scale irrigation ditch and was used to bring water down from Kilohana Crater.  A young German immigrant, Paul Isenberg, joined the plantation in 1858 and served as its manager from 1862 to 1878.  The Lihu‘e Plantation's land holdings continued to grow with the acquisition of 17,000 acres at Hanama‘ulu in 1872 and the lease of 30,000 acres at Wailua in 1878.

By 1910, the town of Lîhu‘e was a growing government and commercial center thanks to the income generated by Lihu‘e Plantation and the nearby Grove Farm Plantation.  The plantation provided land and support for hospitals, schools and churches.  To feed its workers and their families, the plantation set up a ranching and dairy farm operation and backed the first general stores in the area.  Company lands were sold for the site of the new county building.  The plantation greatly expanded again when in 1910 it purchased the Makee Plantation at Kealia and the 6,000-acre Princeville Plantation from the Wilcox family in 1916.

Kauai's other important sugar plantation, Kekaha Sugar Co., began when Norwegian immigrant, Valdemar Knudsen, received 30-year leases on Crown lands at Mana and Kekaha in 1856.  Knudsen took over the leases from another Norwegian who tried unsuccessfully to raise tobacco on the land.  Feeling that he was too old to build a sugar plantation, Knudsen enticed a group of his nephews to Kauai.  Part of the land was sublet to a Chinese rice grower, who in turn provided laborers to the fledgling sugar plantation.  The Knudsens drained 50 acres of marshy land in the low-lying Mana Plain and planted the first crop in 1878.  In 1880, Paul Isenberg, who prospered as plantation manager at the Lihu‘e Plantation, and George Norton Wilcox, from the Grove Farm Plantation, joined forces with the Knudsens to build the first mill at Kekaha.  The arid southwest corner of the island receives only 20 inches of rain a year, mainly in winter.  Initially the first artesian wells drilled in Hawaii provided irrigation water.  As the plantation grew, work began in 1907 on the 28-mile Waimea-Kekaha ditch. By 1910, Kekaha Sugar had a plantation railroad system with 15 miles of permanent track.  Cane floated down the mountains on flumes to the railway loading docks.

A plantation worker victimized the railway in 1920 in the first and only train robbery ever attempted on Kauai.  Inspired by cowboy movies, the robber made off with the plantation's $10,000 payroll.  His trial, where he testified he did it mainly for the thrill, drew overflow crowds at the Lihu‘e courthouse.

Sugar plantations were labor intensive and the native population of Kauai was in decline, due largely to imported diseases.  The population of Kauai dropped from an estimated 12,000 in 1831-32 to 7,800 in 1853.  The pragmatic islanders that were left saw little value in the backbreaking, low-paying work of harvesting sugar cane, especially when the land and the sea offered them plenty of food staples.  To supplement the workforce, plantation owners recruited workers accustomed to working long days in hot weather from overseas.  In 1852, the first group of indentured workers arrived from China.  In the decades to follow, immigrants from Japan, Portugal, the Philippines and Korea came to toil in the cane fields and to add to the ethnic mix of the islands.