Harvey Rexford Hitchcock

November 12, 2017 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Ali‘i Letters Beretane to ABCFM (1852)

Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives (Mission Houses) collaborated with Awaiaulu Foundation to digitize, transcribe, translate and annotate over 200-letters written by 33-Chiefs.

The letters, written between 1823 and 1887, are assembled from three different collections: the ABCFM Collection held by Harvard’s Houghton Library, the HEA Collection of the Hawaii Conference-United Church of Christ and the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society.

These letters provide insight into what the Ali‘i (Chiefs) were doing and thinking at the time, as well as demonstrate the close working relationship and collaboration between the aliʻi and the missionaries.

In this letter, EP Kamai Beretane writes to the ABCFM regarding the return of Rev. Hitchcock and his wife, their long dedication to the people of Molokai and the strides made in the betterment of the lifestyle there.

Harvey Rexford Hitchcock came with the fifth company of missionaries, founded the first church on Molokai and worked there for many years with his wife, Rebecca Howard.

EP Kamai Beretane – Also spelled Kamaipelekane, this man was a district judge on Molokai and went on to become a member of the house of representatives.

“Nov. 13, 1852”

“Na E.P. Kamai Beretane”

“To the Prudential Committee of the ABCFM”

“Salutations to you.”

“I am inconsiderable brother, living on Molokai declare to you my mind reporting the return of Mr and Mrs Hitchcock to meet with you in their native land. They return on account of their frequent infirmities.”

“They have persevered a long time but have no improvement in health among us. It is therefore thought best that they go there if perchance they may in some degree improve in health and then return.”

“But that is uncertain they may recover and may not, it is with God’s consent.”

“They return greatly beloved by us, very great are Our obligations, to them for their patience in teaching us religion, and teaching our schools.”

“Molokai excels all the islands of the group in peacefulness, docility, activity in every good event, and in the knowledge of the children, and members of the church; as well as in sound comfort – and in constituting [unintelligible] unanimously to all benevolent objects.”

“When they first landed on Molokai it was an ignorant and backward …and – poverty stricken land. seeing our distressed and death like condition.”

“They disregarded their life and devoted it and their strength for ours. From their first arrival 20 years and upward until the present time they have labored hard for our good. Constantly and immeasurably have thy been engaged for the benefit of the people.”

“They have consequently become sick and infirmed. They leave us greatly beloved and with our heartfelt pain, on their account
they also leave us, their children with heartfelt pain.”

“Our Step father father [unintelligible] with us Mr Andrews – Our own father leaves us it my chief – love is to my own father – that to the step father is only a part.”

“They two return greatly beloved by Hawaiians, and and with a name over their hearts which is better than gold or silver. I have done.”

“yours respectfully R. P. Kamai Beretane member of the Hawaiian Parliament & District judge of Molokai.”

Here’s a link to the original letter, its transcription, translation and annotation:

https://hmha.missionhouses.org/files/original/0a0641a281a6b90c6f9f1d32016a9c60.pdf

On October 23, 1819, the Pioneer Company of American Protestant missionaries from the northeast US, led by Hiram Bingham, set sail on the Thaddeus for the Sandwich Islands (now known as Hawai‘i.) They arrived in the Islands and anchored at Kailua-Kona on April 4, 1820.

Over the course of a little over 40-years (1820-1863 – the “Missionary Period”,) about 180-men and women in twelve Companies served in Hawaiʻi to carry out the mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the Hawaiian Islands.

One of the earliest efforts of the missionaries, who arrived in 1820, was the identification and selection of important communities (generally near ports and aliʻi residences) as “stations” for the regional church and school centers across the Hawaiian Islands.

Hawaiian Mission Houses’ Strategic Plan themes note that the collaboration between Native Hawaiians and American Protestant missionaries resulted in the
• The introduction of Christianity;
• The development of a written Hawaiian language and establishment of schools that resulted in widespread literacy;
• The promulgation of the concept of constitutional government;
• The combination of Hawaiian with Western medicine, and
• The evolution of a new and distinctive musical tradition (with harmony and choral singing).

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Beretane to ABCFM Nov 13, 1852-1

Beretane to ABCFM Nov 13, 1852-2

August 29, 2017 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Siloama Protestant Church

In 1832, twelve years after initiation of the American Protestant Mission, a young New England Protestant minister, the Reverend Harvey R Hitchcock, was sent with his wife to Christianize the people of Molokai. They settled at Kalua‘aha. The first Protestant church at Kalua‘aha was built of thatch in early 1833.

A school soon followed, and it was not long before a small community was forming around the church buildings. It became the social center of the entire island, with people coming from as far away as the windward valleys, over the pali and by canoe, just to attend church sermons on Sunday. (Strazar)

Despite Kalaupapa’s distance from that station, its residents often climbed the pali or came by sea to attend church meetings. (NPS)

The Kalua‘aha Mission Station Report (1836-37) notes, “At Kalaupapa a populous district on the windward side of the island and about thirty miles from the station a school of 160 scholars might be collected immediately were there a teacher to superintend it.”

Hitchcock held a three-day meeting at Kala‘e, on the cliffs above Kalaupapa, in 1838, which was attended by many from the peninsula and the northern valleys. (An out-station of the Kalua‘aha mission was established there around 1840.) In 1839 a Hawai’ian missionary teacher named Kanakaokai was stationed on the peninsula.

Hitchcock noted on a tour of the island in August of that year that a large stone meeting house had been constructed at Kalaupapa with a thatched house for the missionary.

Adjacent to the house was a field where cotton was planted to be used at a missionary spinning and weaving school at Lahaina, Maui. Hitchcock also mentioned that people living in Pelekunu were part of the Kalaupapa congregation. (NPS)

In 1841 the population of Kalaupapa, probably including Waikolu Valley, was about 700 persons, of which 30 were church members. Hitchcock noted that “There are considerable comfortable accommodations for a family there, a large native house walled in – The meeting house is large.” (Kalau‘aha Mission Station Report, 1841)

By 1847 the first Kalaupapa stone meetinghouse had been replaced with a more substantial structure measuring twenty-eight by seventy feet. Also another missionary, the Reverend C. B. Andrews, had been assigned as assistant to Hitchcock on Molokai. (NPS)

“The People at Kalaupapa who have but recently finished a stone house – 60 by 30 feet, are now engaged in collecting funds for a new and more durable one intending to devote the old one to the use of the school.” (Kalau‘ahu Mission Station Report, 1851)

Then, life in the Islands, and the peninsula, changed. In 1865, the Legislative Assembly passed, and King Kamehameha V approved, ‘An Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy,’ which set apart land to isolate people believed capable of spreading the disease. (NPS)

On January 6, 1866, the first group of patients including nine men and three women arrived. Of the twelve who arrived on that day, two men and a woman – Kahauliko, Lono and Nahuina – would go on to become founding members of the first church to be established in the settlement. (Keawelai)

During the first year of patients arriving at Kalawao in 1866, church members came together and formed a Congregational church, they named it Siloama, Church of the Healing Spring.

“Thrust out by mankind, these 12 women and 23 men, crying aloud to God, their only refuge, formed a church, the first in the desolation that was Kalawao.”

Despite being hungry, cold, and, at times, neglected, the people of Kalawao worked hard from the very beginning to build their own community, establishing a church the very first year. Siloama Church – the Church of the Healing Spring – gave residents something to cling to, a refuge in God. (HCUCC)

The Protestant patients organized a congregation and saved $125.50 for a church building. Additional funds were donated in Honolulu and lumber shipped to Kalawao. (NPS)

Siloama Protestant Church was the first church to be erected at Kalawao Settlement at Kalaupapa, it was originally constructed and dedicated on October 28, 1871 by the Protestant Congregational Church.

The church was named for the pool of Siloam (the Hebrew word ‘Siloam’ means ‘sent,’ Pool of the Sent.) It was where Jesus told a blind man, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam”. So the man went and washed and came back seeing. (John 9:7)

Kana‘ana Hou Church (New Canaan church) was a branch of Siloama’s church; it was built in Kalaupapa in 1878 and enlarged in 1890. In 1881, the congregations of Kalawao and Kalaupapa united as Kanaana Hou. Siloama Church was rebuilt in the 1960s.

Belgium-born Joseph De Veuster arrived in Honolulu on March 19, 1864. There he was ordained a Catholic Priest in the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace on May 31 and took the name of Damien.

His first calling was on the big island of Hawai‘i, where he spent eight years, serving in Puna, Koala and Hāmākua. He learned of the need for priests to serve the 700 Hansen’s disease victims confined at Kalawao; he arrived on May 10, 1873 (following the Protestants and Mormons to the isolated peninsula.)

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Siloama Protestant Church-DMY-400

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Siloama Protestant Church, Moloka’i Island, Kalaupapa, Kalawao County, HI-LOC

Siloama Protestant Church-HMCS

Siloama Protestant Church-PPWD-11-6-012

Siloama Protestant Church-general view, Moloka’i Island, Kalaupapa, Kalawao County, HI-LOC

Siloama Protestant Church-from Southwest, Moloka’i Island, Kalaupapa, Kalawao County, HI-LOC

Siloama Protestant Church-facing, Moloka’i Island, Kalaupapa, Kalawao County, HI-LOC

Siloama Protestant Church-entrance to alter, Moloka’i Island, Kalaupapa, Kalawao County, HI-LOC

Kanaana Hou Calvinist Church, Moloka’i Island, Kalaupapa, Kalawao County-LOC

Kalawina Church is the oldest religious, built in 1854-now used as Ranger Station

Siloama Protestant Church plaque

April 3, 2015 by Peter T Young 3 Comments

Kaluaʻaha Congregational Church

Harvey Rexford Hitchcock sailed as a missionary with the Fifth Company of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. They sailed aboard the Averick, leaving New Bedford, November 26, 1831 and arriving in Honolulu, May 17, 1832.

He was assigned to Molokai and established the first permanent Mission Station on the Island at Kaluaʻaha in 1832. Rebecca Hitchcock noted shortly after their arrival that there was not a foreigner on the island and no horses except for a lame one belonging to a chief. (Curtis)

Hitchcock preached his first sermon in Hawaiian the last week of September 1832 in the open air.

The Hawaiian Association, meeting in Lāhainā, Maui, on June 19, 1833, adopted a resolution stating: “Resolved that the native Hawaiian members of the Church resident at Kaluaʻaha, Molokai, be a particular Church with the Reverend Harvey Rexford Hitchcock as pastor.”

In the Molokai Station Report, Hitchcock wrote, “in about two months a meeting house was finished 30 feet by 120.” It was probably built of thatch. (HABS)

“There is a delightful cluster of shade trees before our door, which was formerly a favorite resort of the chiefs; and under it, for several successive weeks, we met for the worship … On our arrival, there was no house of any importance, and few of any kind in the vicinity.”

“During the year, however, many comfortable houses have been built, with sleeping apartments, and other accommodations which give to them an air of neatness and comfort hitherto unknown on the island.” (Smith; Missionary Herald)

In 1834, the Hitchcocks received additional help with the arrival of Rev and Mrs Lowell Smith (Smith was a college mate of Hitchcock – who arrived on the Sixth Company in 1833.)

The expanding mission was growing close to 500 members and two outstations, one in the east and one in the west, had been established.

In 1835, a second meeting house was of a more permanent nature, “The meeting house … has been completed. It is built of stone laid up in mud mixed with grass. The walls are three feet thick; It is 90 feet long and 42 wide and 12 feet high plastered and whitewashed outside an in.”

“The frame of the house is of the first rate. The thatching is of the leaf of the spiral pandanus, surmounted at the ends and ridgepole by a thick border of the ki leaf. The framework inside is concealed by large light-colored mats nailed to the underside of the beams, and the floor consists of a carpet of the same material. The pulpit is three feet high made perfectly plain.”

“The base is a block of masonry. It accommodates probably between 1,200 and 1,300 hearers. It could not have been built by contract for less than $2000 but has cost the mission little more than $100. It was dedicated December 6 when Mr. Richards preached … The house was crowded and hundreds could not get in.” (HABS)

By 1836 the membership of the church had increased to 655, then doubled by 1843. The need for a larger building and the probability that repairs on the 1835 building were imminent were reported in the Molokai Station Report which continued, “it (the new building) has been commenced and the stone work about 1/4 or a little more up.” This was the third and present church. (HABS)

In the mid-1840s, they were working on building a new church; “Our main work the past year has been the erection of a permanent house of worship … Preparing most of the timber and getting it onto the ground from the distance of ten miles or more, procuring many of the stones for building …”

It was dedicated on April 3, 1844; “The house has been completed nearly two months. It is 100 feet long by 50 broad outside; walls 2-1/2 feet thick and 18 feet high”.

“The thatching is pilimaoli. It leaks but little; has 4 doors three of which are 7 feet high and about as wide…” (Hitchcock; HABS) (In 1908, it was reportedly the largest building outside Honolulu.) (Hawaiian Evangelical Association, 1908)

The structure was constructed out of fieldstone, walls plastered on both sides. A double row of 14-inch wood columns with 17-inch wood beams supported the interior trusses, and matching columns were also added along each side wall. The interior was a single large open space with raised lectern and choir platform across the east end. (NPS)

Kaluaʻaha Church, known as the Mother Church on Molokai, is the oldest Congregational Church on the island. It is also one of the largest churches built in its time in Hawaiʻi.

The dilapidated condition of the church building was reported in 1897, but it appears that it was not re-roofed and replastered until 1899. After this there was apparently a period of “disuse” until 1908 as noted by the church report for that year.

“The installation of Rev. Isaac D. Iaea as pastor of the long vacant Kaluaʻaha Church was an occasion of great joy and satisfaction to the people of this sidetracked island. The fine old church was filled.” (Hawaiian Evangelical Association, 1908)

By 1917 the membership of the church had dropped to 60. Used off and on; modestly repaired, on May 15, 1967 the steeple, which had tilted for years, fell from its base to the ground. (Remnants of the church are still there; in 2009, a new roof was built inside the walls of the existing church.)

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January 8, 2015 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Harvey Rexford Hitchcock, the oldest son of eleven children of David (a shoemaker and author of several books) and Sarah (Swan) Hitchcock, was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, March 13, 1800.

Hitchcock joined the Congregational church in Great Barrington, January 5, 1817. He entered Williams College as a Junior in 1826; he graduated on September 3, 1828.

After graduation, Hitchcock studied theology at Auburn Seminary, where he was graduated in 1831. On August 26, 1831, he married Miss Rebecca Howard of Auburn, New York.

Within a couple of months, he sailed as a missionary with the Fifth Company of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. They sailed aboard the Averick, leaving New Bedford, November 26, 1831 and arriving in Honolulu, May 17, 1832.

Others in the Fifth Company included Rev. William P Alexander, Richard Armstrong, John S Emerson, Cochran Forbes, David B Lyman (Hitchcock’s college classmate,) Lorenzo Lyons, Ephraim Spaulding (their wives and others.)

In 1834, the Hitchcocks received additional help with the arrival of Rev and Mrs Lowell Smith (Smith was a college mate of Hitchcock – who arrived on the Sixth Company in 1833.)

The expanding mission was growing close to 500 members and two outstations, one in the east and one in the west, had been established.

Smith gave this description of the Island and its people: “The people reside mostly on the eastern part of the island, on the north and south sides; but the greater number are on the latter.” (The estimated Island population was about 6,000.)

“Their houses, many of them, are no more than five or six feet long by four wide and five feet from the ridge-pole to the ground; and these are not unfrequently the habitations of two, three, and sometimes more individuals of both sexes.” Each is “But one apartment, no floor, no window, no chimney, except the humble door at which you enter.”

“The name of the elation is Kaluaʻaha; it is owned by the best and one of the most pious high chiefs on the islands, who desired us to take it as our station, assuring us at the same time, that she would act the part of a parent to us. We have fenced off about two acres of land as a door yard and garden, and might have extended our limits much farther had we chosen. “

Hitchcock preached his first sermon in Hawaiian the last week of September 1832 in the open air. In the Molokai Station Report, Hitchcock wrote, “in about two months a meeting house was finished 30 feet by 120.” It was probably built of thatch. (HABS)

“A spacious school-house is nearly completed, so that the station begins to assume the appearance of a small village.” (Smith; Missionary Herald)

Nearby was Pukoʻo; it had a natural break in the reef with a perfect beach for landing canoes. Hitchcock’s early church records often mentioned this location as the most convenient for travel to Lāhainā. (Curtis)

In a January 1840 letter from Hitchcock, we get a glimpse of his daily life, “I hope to continue without interruption my present system of labors; that is, to hold a Bible class Sabbath morning of twenty-five girls, preach at ten o’clock, have an adult Sabbath-school at noon, and preach again at four.”

“My week-day labors are as follows, – a Bible class daily with the above-mentioned company of females, who are committing Matthew to memory at the rate of six verses a day. I spend some time with them in teaching singing.”

“On Tuesday and Thursday mornings I preach at sunrise, and preach regularly on Wednesday afternoon. Saturday evening I have a lecture for the church. Once in two weeks on Friday I address the men’s benevolent society, or catechise them on the New Testament; and on Tuesday have a Bible class of adults.”

“I make it a point, as far as possible, to visit some parts of the parish daily, and hold direct religious conversation with the people. In these visits I am happy to say that I am received with respect, and listened to by the people. Rarely have I gone to one house and commenced conversation, without drawing around me others, particularly the aged.”

“My miscellaneous labors consist in conversing with those who resort to my study for the purpose, and giving out medicine for the sick. I am trying also to crowd in a weekly lecture on the most important points in theology, designed for several of the most pious and intelligent members of our church, in order to enable them to become more efficient helpers in the great work.” (Hitchcock, Missionary Herald)

It was dedicated on April 3, 1844; “The house has been completed nearly two months. It is 100 feet long by 50 broad outside; walls 2-1/2 feet thick and 18 feet high. …. The thatching is pilimaoli. It leaks but little; has 4 doors three of which are 7 feet high and about as wide…” (Hitchcock; HABS) (Remnants of the church are still there; in 2009, a new roof was built inside the walls of the existing church.)

Hitchcock died August 29, 1855 … “for 23 years he has labored with unusual devotion, zeal and earnestness to enlighten, purify and elevate the people … He lived to see his labors crowned with wonderful success.”

“His great work was indeed the preaching of the gospel; yet in the infant state of the people, he had to superintend every thing, schools were to be created and managed; the sick, the aged and the destitute to be cared for; civil officers to be advised, the whole people clad and civilized and their souls saved.”

“He gave himself heartily to his work and made an unreserved consecration. … He did desire to live longer, not however for any selfish end, but that he might preach the gospel.” (The Friend, September 29, 1855) (His grandson was David Howard Hitchcock, the notable artist in Hawaiʻi.)

The image shows Harvey Rexford Hitchcock. In addition, I have added other images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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