Economy | Page 171 | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

September 7, 2017 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Pedestrian Suspension Bridges

Once a flourishing community existed in the heart of Kapaia Valley on Kauai.

In the 1920s, most of the plantation villagers traveled by foot because they could not afford to own an automobile. A foot bridge was used daily to go to and from work, school, shopping and recreation.

The Kapaia Swinging Bridge crosses the Kapaia Stream, whose source is the Kapaia Reservoir and outlet is Hanama‘ulu Bay.

Kapaia Camp was one of many camps established by Līhu‘e Plantation. Workers from Kapaia irrigated and maintained the sugar cane fields at Hanama‘ulu.

Because the Kapaia terrain made it unsuitable for sugar cultivation, Līhu‘e Plantation allowed the area to be used for shops, churches and other agricultural activities. Lands were leased, and later sold to farmers and businessmen.

The interspersion of private landowners, business enterprises and the plantation camp gave the community of Kapaia a truly unique, multicultural character.

Chinese and Japanese shops with names like Ah Chock, Naganuma, Ogata and Ihara established themselves to serve the people of the area. Portuguese merchants such as Fernandes and Carvalho opened general merchandising stores.

Built first as a low foot crossing, it bridged upper Kapaia to the lower valley. Often, heavy rains swept through the stream, washing away the low foot bridge, creating a huge inconvenience for the villagers.

Finally, in 1948, a suspension bridge was constructed by the County of Kauai.

Much of the plantation housing was located on the “Upper Kapaia” (Kapaia Road) side of the bridge. The Immaculate Conception Catholic Church occupied the east side of the Kapaia Stream. Rice fields, a Filipino camp, taro patches, Hawaiian and Japanese families lived on the inner valley side.

On the west side of the bridge stood the Līhu‘e Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, Korean Methodist Church and Chinese Church. Naganuma Store, Ogata Store, Moriwake and Ah Chock’s store lined the road leading up to the main Kūhiō Highway.

The pathway across the Kapaia Foot Bridge was much shorter and more convenient than climbing up Kapaia Road, onto Kuhio Highway, then trekking down the highway to the shops and churches.

Most of the traversing was done by people walking from their camp homes, across the bridge, to all of the activity on the “Lower Valley” side of Kapaia Stream.

Japanese children from Hanama‘ulu and upper Kapaia Valley crossed daily to attend Japanese School. Plantation laborers from the “Middle and Lower Valley” met across the bridge at 5 am daily to walk together to Hanama‘ulu, where they were trucked to the sugar fields.

Housewives walked back and forth the bridge to do their daily grocery shopping and to visit friends. These are just a few examples demonstrating the integral role of the Kapaia Foot Bridge, evolving to become the Kapaia Swinging Bridge in 1948, in the daily life of Kauai’s sugar plantation immigrant population.

With the emergence of automobiles as a major form of transportation, and with the closing of sugar plantations, the swinging bridge became less important as a mode of transportation.

In the 1950s and early-60s, Līhu‘e Plantation began phasing out camp housing, offering private ownership to their employees in Hanama’ulu, Lihue and elsewhere.

By 2000, when Līhu‘e Plantation closed, all of the plantation housing had disappeared and all of the private farms and businesses were gone. Only remnants of a once flourishing plantation community still exist.

In September, 2006, the Kapaia Swinging Bridge was declared unsafe for use and was closed. Concerned citizens have been working with governmental entities to restore and maintain the bridge. (NPS)

The Kapaia Swinging Bridge is a suspension bridge. It is one of four known similarly constructed pedestrian suspension bridges in Hawaii. All are located on Kauai – Hanapepe, Waimea and Kapa‘a.

The wooden deck is suspended from hangers attached to steel cables draped over 2 wooden towers and secured into solid concrete/boulder anchorages at both ends. The cable span between the two 15’ 10” tall towers of the Kapaia Swinging Bridge is 80’. The entire bridge is 125’ long.

Hanapepe Swinging Bridge was built in 1911; it was later extensively rebuilt after Hurricane Iniki in 1992. The 3-foot wide Hanapepe bridge has a span of 172.0 feet

Waimea’s pedestrian suspension bridge is at the ‘Menehune Ditch;’ this 3-foot wide bridge was built in the early 1900s and was damaged and rebuilt following Hurrican Iniki in 1992. Kapa‘a’s bridge is 125-feet in length.

Kauai is not the only Island with pedestrian-only bridges; of note, Maui has a couple, an older bridge in Waihe‘e and a new one in Kapalua. (Lots of information here is from Historic Register, Save Kapaia Swinging Bridge, Bridgemeister and BridgeHunter.)

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September 4, 2017 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

EE Black

He was born Everette Earl Black. His company was called EE Black; folks called him ‘Johnny’.

“My partner that worked in the same stuff with me in the mine – I think we’d been in and had a beer, as I remember, and had come out that here was this good-looking girl and her mother, older woman, standing on the corner.”

“I said, ‘I’ll bet you a buck I can make mother and all.’ So I went up to her and I said, ‘Good evening.’ She had to introduce me to her mother and she called me Johnny Jones and the Johnny stuck.”

Black “was born on a log cabin ten miles from Terre Haute”, Indiana in 1889. His father “was originally a farmer, and then a carpenter, then a railroad car builder – freight cars first and then passenger cars later – for the Pennsylvania Railroad.”

“(W)e were what they called poor honest people. … I started selling papers on the street when I was nine years old, and as I got older I had a paper route and I had a paper route all the way through engineering school till I was twenty-two.” He also sold drawing instruments for Keuffel Instrument Agency.

“I graduated actually in electrical engineering. I was offered a job – I don’t know whether it was Westinghouse or General Electric now – at fourteen cents an hour, ten hours a day, six days a week. I was doing better than that with the rackett I had selling papers and instruments and stuff like that, so I wasn’t interested.”

So I had an uncle in Victor, Colorado on the old (Portland Mining Company) gold mine and I shook him down for a job, so I worked in the gold mine for a year after I graduated and got a little money ahead … I didn’t have the education sufficient to give me a chance to go up … So I left to Salt Lake and got a job at the Garfield Smelter”.

He and George Collins “got seventy- five dollars a month. George Collins married ‘Tillie Neumann from Honolulu here who was related to the Hackfelds who ran the H Hackfeld which is now American Factors, and he had a job on the Waiahole tunnel to develop water for the high cane fields”.

“He wired me that there was a job for $150.00 if I wanted it, because I’d had experience in driving tunnels. So I went back to Victor, Colorado and got my gal (Ruth Aliene Emens) and we came out here and arrived on the old Sonoma on the 10th of June, 1913.”

“Then I got a job with the US Army Engineers in fortification and river and harbor work, and l had to be a civil engineer to get over a hundred dollars, so I passed the civil engineer examination and got raised to $125. 00.”

“I worked there about three years and then I got a job with the City and County as an engineer, mostly project engineer on improvements that they were doing then, and became assistant city engineer at one time.”

“It was during this time that EF Ford had a job of paving Lusitana Street and he had a superintent … that knew less about running a job than he should have and Mr Lord was losing his shirt and he got excited.”

“I said, ‘I can do the engineering work here for the city and county and run your job, too, better that it’s being run now.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You’re not fooling, huh?’ I said, ‘I’m sure not fooling..”

“So I went to work with the men. l used to work with them, shoveling concrete and that sort of stuff because there was a lot of handwork in those days … it changed from a losing job to a profitable job so he offered me a job working for him as an engineer assistant to him, So I went to work for him for three years.”

Black later left Lord and “got a job with an old contracting company, Hawaiian Contracting Company, and I was in charge of quite a lot of the work on the famous Doheny work tanks and piers and one thing and another down at Pearl Harbor … (I earned) my first five thousand dollar bonus that paid for my house.”

“Then Mr Lord offered me a forty percent interest in the company if I’d come back after some three years and I went back to work with him, and not too long afterwards he wanted to get out, so that he took the money and I took the plant and in 1930 it became EE Black, Limited.”

The company was originally headquartered on O‘ahu, where it maintained its own office building, maintenance/ wood working shops, steel fabricating facilities and heavy equipment storage yard. It is well tooled and financed to serve as general contractor.

In 1958, the Black Group of Companies expanded his Hawai‘i-based operations westward to Guam with the construction of 1,050 concrete single and duplex buildings for the Capehart Military Housing area at Andersen Air Force Base Guam.

In 1962 Robert Black Everett Earl’s son took control of his father’s company and formed EE Black Ltd’s subsidiary on Guam known today as Black Construction Corp.

EE Black became one of Hawai‘i’s largest contractors. “I received a tremendous amount of help from people all over this state, and it makes me feel very humble because I’ve been given credit for things that other people have come pretty near doing themselves.”

In 2008, merger of Tutor-Saliba and Perini Corporation took place which made EE Black, Ltd. a Tutor Perini company. The parent company office is located in Sylmar, California. The company eventually withdrew from Hawai‘i to focus on its operations in Guam.

Over the years, Black has developed diversity and flexibility. The increasing number of new clients as well as repeat clients enhanced its reputation, earning the company’s slogan “On Track with Black”. (EE Black) (The bulk of this information is from an oral history interview with EE ‘Johnny’ Black.)

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EE Black Cranes

August 31, 2017 by Peter T Young 3 Comments

Niu

Revelations 22:2 refers to the coconut as “the tree of life, which bears twelve manner of fruits, and yieldeth her fruit every month.” Scientists generally believe that coconut came from the Indian Archipelago or Polynesia. (Tsai)

Early Arabs and Europeans in the first half of the ninth century mentioned that travellers to China referred to the use of coir fiber and of toddy. Medieval writers called the coconut the Indian nut, a palm tree the frond of which produced a fruit as large as a man’s head.

The genus name of coconut (Cocos) probably was derived from the Spanish word coco, used to describe a monkey’s face, because of the three “eyes” at the base of the coconut shell. (CTAHR)

When the first Polynesians landed and settled in Hawaiʻi (about 1000 to 1200 AD (Kirch)) they brought with them shoots, roots, cuttings and seeds of various plants for food, cordage, medicine, fabric, containers, all of life’s vital needs.

“Canoe crops” (Canoe Plants) is a term to describe the group of plants brought to Hawaiʻi by these early Polynesians. One of these was ‘niu,’ the coconut; they used it for food, cordage, etc.

Hawai‘i is on the edge of the coconut belt. The coconut bears better nearer the equator, where it is more widely used than here. In Hawai`i there are other plants, native and introduced, that provide as well for people’s needs.

This palm is the most useful plant of the tropics. It is said that more uses are made of it than any other tree in the world. Besides drink, food and shade, niu offers the possibilities of …

… housing, thatching, hats, baskets, furniture, mats, cordage, clothing, charcoal, brooms, fans, ornaments, musical instruments, shampoo, containers, implements and oil for fuel, light, ointments, soap and more. (CanoePlants)

The tree bears fruit around the seventh birthday, for up to 70-100 years, providing food for a human lifetime. There may be up to 50 fruit a year. A he‘e (octopus) was often planted in the bottom of the hole, furnishing fertilizer and giving the plant the idea of roots that spread and grip, and a body that is fat and round.

As food, the niu flesh or meat is used for different purposes, depending upon the maturity of the nut. The jelly-like spoon meat of a green nut is called ‘o‘io. The next stage is haohao, when the shell is still white and the flesh soft and white.

Half ripe, at the ho‘ilikole state, it is eaten raw with Hawai`i red salt and poi. At the o‘o stage, the nut is mature, but the husk not dried.

The flesh of a mature nut at the malo`o stage is used to make coconut cream, which when mixed with kalo (taro) makes a dish called kulolo; with ‘uala (sweet potato) it is called poipalau; and paipaiee with ripe ‘ulu (breadfruit.) (CanoePlants)

The trunks used to make house posts, small canoes, hula drums, or food containers. Leaves (launiu) used to for baskets, thatch and for fans, known as some of the finest in Polynesia. Leaf sheaths used as food or fish-bait wrappers.

Husk fibers also used for cordage to make nets or lashing, known as ‘aha; the cordage could be coarse or fine. The cordage can be made into supports for ‘umeke (bowls) or other round-based objects.

Shell of fruit was used for eating utensils, such as spoons, bowls, plates, as well as ‘awa cups and strainers for ‘awa. Niu shells also served for storage containers, lids, and knee drums or puniu; the fibers are made into a drum beater

A musical instrument, the hokiokio, can also be made from coconut shell. Small mortars and bull roarers (oeoe) are also made from the niu shell. Sometimes the niu “shell” used to make ‘uli‘uli (hula rattles.)

Niu water used as a drink, and flesh eaten raw or with poi. Oil from meat used on body and hair. The mid-rib of the niu leaf is used as the “skewer” for a kukui nut torch (kali lukui). (Bishop Museum)

Later, some commercial uses of niu included copra. “Samples of copra (dried meat of coconut) grown here have been forwarded to San Francisco ….”

“The quality of the product is excellent, comparing favorably with that of the best grade received in that market, and the price per pound is satisfactory. So well pleased are the people on the Coast that they have signified a willingness to take all that can be shipped to them.”

“The copra is compressed and the extracted oil used in the manufacture of soaps, and as oils in the manufacture of high-grade paints. Another use to which it is put is the manufacture of shredded cocoanut, which is utilized by confectioners and bakers. The fiber is made into hawsers (ropes) for towing purposes.” (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, May 12, 1907)

“One of the uses to which copra is put and for which there has not yet been found an available substitute is in the production of salt water soap, soap that will lather and be effective in salt water. (Pacific Commercial Advertiser, September 15, 1907)

“‘Don’t wait to get fresh milk from Honolulu. Use the cow of the Pacific.’ The coconut is known as the cow of the Pacific. Its milk is very nourishing. I said, ‘Get me two nuts and I’ll show you how to make both cream and milk.’” (Fullard-Leo)

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Coconuts

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Rope from coconut husks

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Niu-Coconut-(NPS photo by Bryan Harry)

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Coconut

August 28, 2017 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Hung Wai Ching

“This is a very interesting story that I have never heard before and I have never heard of this man. He is a great leader who rises above the fear, prejudices and anger to pick up a cause to do the right thing for humanity.”

“One wonders if there was never a Hung Wai Ching, where would the Japanese Americans be today?” (Mae Kimura; Yoshinaga)

Hung Wai Ching was born on August 1, 1905, in Hawai‘i. His parents, Yei and Un Fong Ching, came to Hawaii in 1898 from the Chung Shan district of Guangdong province, China. (Ng)

At an early age, his father was killed in an accident, leaving his mother to bring up the six children under circumstances of extreme financial hardship, forcing Hung Wai to sell papers and do odd jobs to help his way through school.

He lived in the predominantly immigrant neighborhood around the Nuʻuanu YMCA. He attended Royal School and graduated in 1924 with the famous McKinley Class of ‘24, which included Hiram Fong, Chinn Ho, Masaji Marumoto and Elsie Ting (to whom he was married for 60 years.)

He graduated from the University of Hawai‘i in 1928 with a degree in civil engineering, earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary and graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1932.

He worked at the Nuʻuanu YMCA as a boys’ secretary and served as secretary of the Atherton YMCA from 1938 to 1941. (Tsukiyama)

In December 1940, he was invited to attend a meeting with the FBI, Army and Navy intelligence, and community leaders present to form the Council on Interracial Unity to prepare the people of Hawaii against the shock of imminent war and to preserve the harmonious race relations among Hawaii’s multiracial population.

When the Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the military governor appointed a Morale Division composed of Charles Loomis, Shigeo Yoshida and Hung Wai to put into effect the plans prepared by the Council of Interracial Unity.

The Morale Division served as bridge between the military government and the civilian community, in particular with the Emergency Service Committee composed of leaders of the Japanese American community.

Ching reported to Col. Kendall J. Fielder of Army Intelligence charged with the internal security of Hawai‘i and also reported to FBI Chief Agent Robert L. Shivers.

There were any number of Japanese in Hawaii who unbeknownst to them were either not detained or were released from internment because of Hung Wai Ching’s intervention on their behalf.

In the first few weeks of the war, the military governor assigned Col. Fielder a quota of Japanese to be picked up each day, but upon consultation with Ching, Fielder refused to make indiscriminate quota arrests, even at the risk of court-martial and his military career.

In January 1942, when all soldiers of Japanese ancestry were discharged from the Hawai‘i Territorial Guard, comprised of UH ROTC students, Ching met, counselled and persuaded these confused, bitter and disillusioned Nisei dischargees to offer themselves to the Military Governor for war time service as a non-combat labor battalion.

The petition of 170 Nisei volunteers was accepted by the Military Governor who assigned this group to the 34 Combat Engineers at Schofield Barracks as a labor and construction corps, popularly to become known as the ‘Varsity Victory Volunteers.’ As Father of the VVVs, Ching showed off the VVVs at every opportunity to military, intelligence and governmental officials.

In late-December 1942, Ching was asked to escort Assistant Secretary of War John J McCloy around military installations on O‘ahu and made certain that McCloy witnessed the VVV volunteers at work in the field.

A few weeks later in January 1943, the War Department announced its decision to form a volunteer all Nisei combat team. This is exactly what the VVV had been working for, so its members disbanded so that they could volunteer for the newly conceived 442nd.

Ching then adopted the 442nd in place of the disbanded VVV and thereafter dedicated himself to seeing that the Nisei got every fair opportunity to prove their loyalty.

“Who knows if we would’ve had a 442nd if it wasn’t for all the things Hung Wai did.” (Tsukiyama)

Through his Morale Division job, Ching met with some very high and influential people, including President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt, but he never used these contacts to benefit himself.

During a 1943 visit to the White House, Ching used the occasion to brief the president on the wartime situation in Hawaii, how well Sen. Emmons and the FBI were handling the “Japanese situation” and assuring him that there was no necessity for a mass evacuation of Japanese from Hawai‘i.

Ching had no question about the loyalty of Japanese he had known all of his life, but he knew that the general American public would never be convinced of the loyalty of Japanese Americans until they could shed their 4-C (enemy alien) status, get back into military service and fight and even die for their country.

The greatest contributions made by Hung Wai Ching were his outspoken affirmation of the loyalty of Japanese Americans and the direct part he played in the long struggle of Japanese Americans to regain that opportunity to bear arms and to prove their ultimate loyalty to America. (Tsukiyama)

After the war Ching became a real estate broker and land developer, as well as continuing to be a leader in the community, serving on several community and company boards. He, along with his brother Hung Wo Ching, helped found Aloha Airlines. (Ng) (Lots of information here from Tsukiyama, Yoshinaga, Gee and Ng.)

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Hung Wai Ching

August 27, 2017 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Titusville

Oil was used more than five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia; bitumen was mined by the Sumerians, Assyrians, and Babylonians, who used it in architecture, building roads, caulking ships, and medicines. Later, knowledge of oil and its uses declined.

Oil seeps to the surface in many parts of the world, so the knowledge of oil did not disappear. This is true in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the Seneca tribe, part of the Iroquois nation, collected seep oil for hundreds of years, using it as a salve, insect repellent, and tonic.

Europeans called the dark, gooey substance Seneca Oil and found it effective for treating sprains and rheumatism. It also burned, but was unappealing as a lamp oil due to its unpleasant odor and smoke.

In the 1840s, scientists in Britain began producing an illuminant from the distillation of coal. Dr. Abraham Gesner, a Canadian geologist, made the first successful coal oil in North America, using a bituminous mineral found in New Brunswick. Gesner called it “keroselain” from the Greek word for ‘wax’ and ‘oil,’ which soon became kerosene. (American Chemical Society)

Then, Edwin L. Drake demonstrated practical oil recovery by applying salt-well drilling techniques, including the use of the derrick, and invented the modern method of driving iron pipe.

On August 27, 1859, Drake struck oil 69-feet down in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The well yielded an average of 1,000-gallons daily for three years. The first export was in 1866, relieving the first glut in the market. (American Society of Mechanical Engineers)

So, what does this have to do with Hawai‘i? Let’s look back …

Candles and whale oil provided most of the artificial light in the decades before the Civil War. Whale oil was also used for heating and lubrication in industrial machinery; whale bone was used in corsets, skirt hoops, umbrellas and buggy whips.

Demand for whale oil intensified – and prices skyrocketed – with the development of mechanized transportation and industrialization. (American Chemical Society)

The over-fishing of “on shore” New England whales in the 1700s forced local whalers to venture “offshore”, journeying further out in search of their lucrative prey.

The first New England whalers rounded Cape Horn into the Pacific in 1791, and fished off both the Chilean and Peruvian coasts. Many sailed around South America and onward to Japan and the Arctic.

Edmond Gardner, captain of the New Bedford whaler Balaena (also called Balena,) and Elisha Folger, captain of the Nantucket whaler Equator, made history in 1819 when they became the first American whalers to visit the Sandwich Islands (Hawai‘i.)

A year later, Captain Joseph Allen discovered large concentrations of sperm whales off the coast of Japan. His find was widely publicized in New England, setting off an exodus of whalers to this area.

These ships might have sought provisions in Japan, except that Japanese ports were closed to foreign ships. So when Captain Allen befriended the missionaries at Honolulu and Lāhainā, he helped establish these areas as the major ports of call for whalers. (NPS)

The whaling industry had a major effect upon Hawaiian commerce and trade. As the Northwest fur trade decreased and sandalwood supplies and values dropped, the whaling industry began to fill the economic void.

By 1822 there were 34-whalers making Hawaiʻi a base of refreshment. The whaling industry was the mainstay of the island economy for about 40 years. For Hawaiian ports, the whaling fleet was the crux of the economy. More than 100 ships stopped in Hawaiian ports in 1824.

From that time the number increased rapidly. Over time, several hundred whaling ships might call in season, each with 20 to 30 men aboard and each desiring to resupply with enough food for another tour “on Japan,” “on the Northwest,” or into the Arctic.

The effect on Hawaiʻi’s economy, particularly in areas in reach of Honolulu, Lāhainā and Hilo, the main whaling ports, was dramatic and of considerable importance in the islands’ history.

Over the next two decades, the Pacific whaling fleet nearly quadrupled in size and in the record year of 1846, 736-whaling ships arrived in Hawai‘i.

Then, whaling came swiftly to an end.

Within a few years of the successful 1859 oil well in Titusville, this new type of oil replaced whale oil for lamps and many other uses – spelling the end of the whaling industry.

By 1862, the whaling industry was in a definite and permanent decline. The effect in the Islands was striking. Prosperity ended, prices fell, cattle and crops were a drag on the market, and ship chandleries and retail stores began to wither.

Sugar soon took its place.

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This is the well near Titusville, Pennsylvania which pumped the petroleum industry into existence 100 years ago. The picture was taken four years after Col. Edwin L. Drake struck oil on August 27, 1859 near Titusville, Pennsylvania. Seated in the foreground is “Uncle” Billy Smith, Drake’s drilling foreman, who was first to notice a dark green liquid bubbling at the top of the hole. His cry of “Oil, struck oil.” Signaled success of the world’s first oil well and set off the world’s first oil book. The Drake well with a depth of 9½ feet, pumped 3 barrels a day. (AP Photo)

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Titusville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania 1871

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