Today’s ‘Timeline Tuesday’ takes us through the 1880s – Kalākaua goes on his world tour, Matson acquires his first vessel, Pauahi dies, Bayonet Constitution and Pearl Harbor is leased by US Navy. We look at what was happening in Hawai‘i during this time period and what else was happening around the rest of the world.
Sisters of Charity
The first shipment of lepers landed at Kalawao (Kalaupapa) January 6, 1866, the beginning of segregation and banishment of lepers to the leper settlement. In January 1883, Walter Gibson, Minister of Foreign Affairs and president of the Board of Health, appealed to obtain Sisters of Charity from one of the many sisterhoods in the US to come and help care for leprous women and girls in the Islands. One of the prime supporters of this action was the Mother Superior, Mother Marianne Cope.
On January 11, 1884, Mother Marianne arrived in Hawai‘i with Sister M Bonaventure Caraher, Sister Crescentia Eilers, Sister Ludovica Gibbons, Sister M Rosalia McLaughlin, Sister Renata Nash and Sister Mary Antonella Murphy. On April 22, 1885, a second group of sisters arrived from Syracuse as reinforcements. This included Sister Leopoldina Burns, Sister Carolina Hoffmann, Sister Martha Kaiser and Sister Benedicta Rodenmacher. Shortly after, Sister Antonia Brown, Sister M. Vincentia McCormick, Sister M. Irena Schorp and Sister Ephrem Schillinger. (More came later.)
Henry P Baldwin Home for Boys and Helpless Men
In 1879, Father Damien established a home at Kalawao for boys and elderly men. By 1886, Father Damien had some twenty or thirty of the patients in a little cluster of shanties and cabins scattered around his house. Father Damien’s home for boys at Kalawao had always been one of the most important facilities at the settlement and a project very dear to his heart.
In 1892, funds were given to the Board of Health by Henry P Baldwin and the Baldwin Home was an enlargement of Father Damien’s Boys’ Home; it was a retreat for leprous boys and to men who, through the progress of the disease or some other cause, had become helpless.
Kapiʻolani Home
Queen Kapi‘olani had visited Kalaupapa in 1884 to learn how she could assist those who were diagnosed with leprosy and exiled there, and she raised the funds to build the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls. Kapiʻolani Home was devoted to the care of non-leprous girls of leprous parents, not yet confirmed as lepers, and others suspected of the disease.
On November 9, 1885, the healthy girls living in Kalawao moved into Kapiʻolani Home on the grounds of the sisters’ convent at the Kaka’ako Branch Hospital. “It will accommodate fifty inmates, besides the matron … The Home is a two-story building, on the mauka side of the Branch Hospital, and separated from it by a high fence.” (A Boys Home was later built in Kalihi.)
Ira Barnes Dutton … ‘Brother Joseph’
Ira Barnes Dutton was born April 27, 1843 on a family farm in Stowe, Vermont, son of Methodist parents Ezra Dutton and Abigail Barnes. His family moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, four years later. In 1861, he enlisted with the 13th Wisconsin Infantry and served in the Union Army during the Civil War as a quartermaster, […]