General | Page 2 | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

October 25, 2026 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Madge Tennent

She was born Madeline Grace Cook in Dulwich, England, on June 22, 1889. Her father owned a construction business; her mother was the editor of a women’s fashion magazine.

When she was five she moved with her family to Cape Town, South Africa. At the age of twelve, she entered an art school in Cape Town.

The following year, her parents, who recognized and encouraged her talent, moved to Paris to enable Madeline to study there In Paris, she studied figure drawing under William Bouguereau, an experience that laid the technical foundation for her later figural drawings and paintings. (Beebe)

Two years later they returned to Cape Town, where Madge taught art and illustrated fashion magazines. She was also an accomplished pianist, taught by her mother, and gave regular recitals in Cape Town. One such recital was attended by a visiting military officer from New Zealand, Hugh Cowper Tennent, who was in South Africa with his regiment.

They married (1915) and returned to his home, New Zealand, where she led the haphazard life of an army camp follower until their first son Arthur was born in 1916.

Madge directed an art school, having been appointed head instructor at the Government School of Art in Woodville, the village where Madge and Hugh lived while he awaited further military orders. (Wageman)

Hugh went off to war in Europe and returned with a seriously wounded hand; the young family was sent to Western Samoa, which had become a New Zealand protectorate after the war, with Hugh as the treasurer of the territory. Their second son, Val, was born there in Apia.

They spent six years in Samoa. During her stay in Samoa, Tennent became fascinated with Polynesians, and while on a leave of several months in Australia, Tennent studied with Julian Ashton “and learned to draw seriously for the first time.” (Beebe)

On a trip to London to enroll the boys in a British boarding school in 1923, the Tennents arrived in Honolulu with their two young sons, planning on a three-day stop-over.

They were introduced to members of the local artistic community, who saw her Samoan studies and asked her to stay and paint the Hawaiians. They stayed.

As a chartered accountant (the British equivalent of a CPA), Hugh was unable to work until he put in a year of residency. Madge supported the family by doing watercolor portraits, mostly of society children. She kept a studio downtown on Hotel Street.

Madge was fascinated by the Hawaiians from the beginning, but true inspiration struck when she was given a book of colored reproductions by Paul Gauguin in Tahiti. From that time on she devoted herself to the single-minded pursuit painting Polynesians.

Often referred to as Hawai‘i’s Gauguin, Tennent was unswerving in her devotion to the beauty of the Hawaiian people with pen, brush and palette knife. (Walls)

She was active in Hawai’i from the 1930s to the 1960s. “The Hawaiians are really to me the most beautiful people in the world … no doubt about it – the Hawaiian is a piece of living sculpture.” (Tennent; HPA)

Tennent portrayed Hawaiian women as solidly fleshed and majestic – larger than life. Her method of working with impasto – applying thick layers of paint to achieve a graceful, perfectly balanced composition – is evident in ‘Lei Queen Fantasia.’

The paint is applied in whirls in what might be called the ‘Tennent whirl’ – the colors bright and luminous. Tennent envisioned Hawaiian Kings and Queens as having descended from Gods of heroic proportion, intelligent and brave, bearing a strong affinity to the Greeks in their legends and persons. (HPA)

Over the years she was very active in the arts community in Honolulu, taught frequent classes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and wrote for publication on art-related subjects. (Walls)

Just a few days before her death in 1972, Tennent summed up her philosophy of life and art for a newspaper reporter who interviewed her, frail and blind, at a private nursing home overlooking Diamond Head. He asked her …

“How does it feel, Mrs. Tennent, to have your genius publicly recognized during your lifetime?” … “Genius, baloney,” she muttered, with all the strength she could muster. “It was nothing but darn hard work.” (Walls)

Major collections of her work are found at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the University of Hawaii. In 2005, Hawai’i Preparatory Academy’s Isaacs Art Center was chosen by the Trustees of the Tennent Art Foundation to become the caretaker of the collection. (HPA) Tennent died February 5, 1972.

October 22, 2026 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Kaumana Cave

Hilo is situated on lava flows from two of the five volcanoes that form the Island of Hawaiʻi. In the northern part of Hilo near the Wailuku River (that forms the approximate boundary between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa Volcanoes,) Mauna Loa flows overlie much older ash deposits and flows from Mauna Kea.

Twenty-seven Mauna Loa flows (pāhoehoe and ʻaʻa) have been identified in and near Hilo. The youngest flow is from the historic Mauna Loa eruption of 1880-81, and the oldest flow yet found lies near Hoaka Road, with an age of more than 24,000 years. (USGS)

The 1881 lavas reached just north of the present University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo campus. After crossing the present Komohana and Kumukoa Streets, a very narrow section crossed what is now Mohouli Street, about 300 yards above the intersection with Kapiʻolani Street.

Several hundred homes are now built on pāhoehoe lavas of the 1881 flow and can easily be recognized by their ubiquitous “rock gardens” (no soils have yet formed on this flow). Kaumana Cave was formed at this time and was a major supply conduit for the lavas that threatened Hilo. (USGS)

Lava Caves (more commonly called lava tubes) are natural conduits through which lava travels beneath the surface of a lava flow. Tubes form by the crusting over of lava channels and pāhoehoe flows.

When the supply of lava stops at the end of an eruption or lava is diverted elsewhere, lava in the tube system drains downslope and leaves partially empty conduits beneath the ground. (USGS)

Kaumana Cave is located up the hill from the downtown area on Kaumana Drive (Saddle Road,) stretching for almost two miles. When you get to the Cave you can see a concrete stair case which leads through the old skylight down to the entrance to the Cave.

The Kaumana Cave, part of a 25-mile-long lava tube, is the centerpiece of a small park maintained by the County of Hawaiʻi. Above Hilo, near the 4-mile marker along Kaumana Drive, the cave’s entrance – actually a skylight formed when part of the lava tube collapsed – is open to curious visitors who want to explore the inside.

The roof of the tube is 20 to 25 feet thick in most places and most of the rubble on the floor fell during or shortly after the eruption, when the skylight entrance fell.

The tube was initially filled with fast-moving lava then the level dropped and a long period of flow along the floor took place and from time to time slopped over to the side creating the bench-like features seen near the cave entrance. Roof blocks fell and became embedded and coated with basalt. The lava stream later emptied leaving the evacuated tube. (Hostra)

A steep staircase leads into a collapse pit. Here the cave roof collapsed and allows entry into the lava tube. From here you can enter different sections of the cave, going mauka (uphill) or makai (downhill) paths.

Going makai, a short path leads to the entrance. There are a few boulders to step carefully through, after which sections of smooth and mostly level surfaces allow a bit easier access. About 50 yards into the downhill section you reach a choke point, a little scrambling and a bit of duck-walk is necessary to get through.

After the narrow, the cave opens back up again. After another hundred yards there are a series of ledges, old crusts left by cooling lava when it half-filled the cave. To continue from here requires crawling through another very low passage. (Cooper)

“Long ʻōhiʻa tree roots hang from overhead … Sides of Cave have dribbles of lava from above forming odd stalagmitelike objects on floor. (There is a) very noticeable slope which is quite easy to travel.”

“Another junction. This one has three branches. There are two shallow rimmed lava cones filled with water. Wedge-shaped overhang is off to one side.” (1953 Loins Club; DOI)

In periods of normal rainfall, running water sometimes is audible beneath the floor of the cave. Rainfalls of 8 to 12 inches produce waterfalls spouting from cracks high on the wall of one cave section.

They form a small stream that runs on or just beneath the floor for several hundred yads before finally sinking into cracks. Its flow is augmented by several small bubbling springs at or just above floor level and part of its flow also is lost into small floor-level cracks. (Halliday)

Kaumana Cave is an example of a lava tube cave that carries floodwater for over half-a-mile. The lower end of Kaumana Cave opens into a drainage ditch several yards below the roadway of Edita Street.

October 19, 2026 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

About 250 Years Ago … Yorktown – Articles of Capitulation

After a series of reverses and the depletion of his forces’ strength, the British commander in the southern colonies, General Lord Cornwallis, moved his army from Wilmington, North Carolina, eastward to Petersburg, Virginia, on the Atlantic coast, in May 1781.

Cornwallis had about 7,500 men and was confronted in the region by only about 4,500 American troops under the marquis de Lafayette, General Anthony Wayne, and Frederick William, Freiherr (baron) von Steuben.

In order to maintain his seaborne lines of communication with the main British army of General Henry Clinton in New York City, Cornwallis then retreated through Virginia, first to Richmond, next to Williamsburg, and finally, near the end of July, to Yorktown and the adjacent promontory of Gloucester, both of which he proceeded to fortify.

The American commander in chief, General George Washington, ordered Lafayette to block Cornwallis’s possible escape from Yorktown by land.

In the meantime Washington’s 2,500 Continental troops in New York were joined by 4,000 French troops under the comte de Rochambeau.

This combined allied force left a screen of troops facing Clinton’s forces in New York while the main Franco-American force, beginning on August 21, undertook a rapid march southward to the head of Chesapeake Bay, where it linked up with a French fleet of 24 ships under the comte de Grasse. This fleet had arrived from the West Indies and was maintaining a sea blockade of Cornwallis’s army.

Cornwallis’s army waited in vain for rescue or reinforcements from the British navy while de Grasse’s fleet transported Washington’s troops southward to Williamsburg, Virginia, whence they joined Lafayette’s forces in the siege of Yorktown. Washington was thus vindicated in his hopes of entrapping Cornwallis on the Yorktown Peninsula.

Meanwhile, a smaller British fleet under Admiral Thomas Graves was unable to counter French naval superiority at the Battle of Virginia Capes and felt forced to return to New York. A British rescue fleet, two-thirds the size of the French, set out for Virginia on October 17 with some 7,000 British troops, but it was too late.

Throughout early October Washington’s 14,000 Franco-American troops steadily overcame the British army’s fortified positions at Yorktown. Surrounded, outgunned, and running low on food, Cornwallis surrendered his entire army on October 19 (though, either ill – as he claimed – or simply humiliated, Cornwallis did not participate in the actual surrender, having delegated that task to Brig. Gen. Charles O’Hara).

The total number of British prisoners taken was about 8,000, along with about 240 guns. Casualties on both sides were relatively light. The victory at Yorktown ended fighting in the Revolution and virtually assured success to the American cause. (Britannica)

On October 19, 1781, the British and Hessian forces under the command of Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered to the French and American forces at Yorktown, Virginia.

The parties then entered into an agreement – Articles of Capitulation – that were the surrender of Cornwallis’s British army. The 14 articles directed the surrender from the disposition of the troops, artillery, and arms, to even the surrender ceremony itself.

The articles directed where the troops, now prisoners of war, were to be sent. The soldiers were marched off to camps in Frederick, Maryland, and Winchester, Virginia. One field officer for every 50 men was allowed to reside near their respective regiments to witness their treatment and deliver clothing and other necessaries to the soldiers at the camps.

All other officers were paroled and allowed to go to Europe, New York, or any other American post then in possession of the British forces, on the condition they would no longer fight until properly exchanged.

Another article provided for the care of the sick and wounded prisoners. Proper hospitals would be furnished, with patients attended by their surgeons on parole. Medicine and supplies were to be provided by the American hospitals, the British stores in both York and Gloucester, and passports would be issued to procure further supplies from New York if necessary.

The third article referred to the surrender ceremony and contained the provision that deprived the British of the honors war. Customary honors allowed the surrendering troops to march out of their works with their regimental flags flying and playing an enemy’s tune in honor of the victor.

George Washington was not going to allow these honors, instead he stated, “The same honors will be granted to the surrendering army as granted to the garrison of Charlestown”.

In May, 1780, an American army was captured at Charleston, South Carolina and not given the honors of war, therefore, in retaliation, the British would not be granted them at Yorktown.

The troops, the article read, were to “…march out…with shouldered arms, colors cased, and drums beating a British or German march. They are then to ground their arms and return to their encampment, where they will remain until they are dispatched to the places of their destination…”

By the afternoon of October 19th, 1781, both commanders had signed the Articles of Capitulation, and the defeated British army was marching out from Yorktown to lay down their arms, ending the last major battle of the American Revolution. (NPS)

Click the following link to a general summary about Yorktown – Articles of Capitulation:

Click to access Yorktown-Articles-of-Capitulation.pdf

October 17, 2026 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

The Artist and the Architect

The artist, known as ‘Palani’ among his Hawaiian friends, was named a ‘Living Treasure’ for his paintings and murals showing Hawai‘i’s culture; the architect was identified as “the man who changed the face of the Pacific”. They got together in 1956.

Let’s look back …

The artist, Louis Henri Jean Charlot, descended from “sundry exotic ancestors,” was born in Paris. His father, Henri, was a French businessman; Anna, his mother, an artist and a devout Catholic, was the daughter of Louis Goupil, a native of Mexico City.

Also living in Paris was Jean Charlot’s great-uncle, Eugène Goupil, a collector of Mexican works of art. Jean, who began to draw around age two, grew up surrounded by pre-Hispanic antiquities. (Thompson)

In his teens, Charlot had become one of a Catholic group that called itself Gilde Notre-Dame (“Parisian adolescents (who) used to gather in a crypt”) made up of sculptors, stained glass makers, embroiderers and decorators.

“My life in France was on the whole rational, national, obeying this often heard dictum that a Frenchman is a man who ignores geography. There were though, simultaneously, un-French elements at work. Russian, sephardim, Aztec ancestors, warmed my blood to adventure.” (Charlot; Thompson)

After a Mexican trip, in 1928, Charlot and his mother moved to New York where he rented a small apartment on the top floor of 42 Union Square from the artist Morris Kantor. The apartment was unheated, which probably contributed to the death of his mother from pneumonia in January, 1929.

On a brief trip to Mexico in 1931, Charlot met his future wife, Dorothy Zohmah Day. During a visit to Zohmah in Los Angeles in 1933, Charlot met the printer Lynton R Kistler and produced Picture Book, “a repertory of motifs I had used up to then.” Returning to New York, teaching and lecturing occupied much of Charlot’s time.

In May 1939, Jean Charlot and Zohmah Day were married in San Francisco. “It was a long courtship,” commented Charlot. “Eight years. We were always in different places”.

The years from 1941-44 were spent as artist-in-residence at the University of Georgia, Athens, and instructor in art history at the University of California, Berkeley and artist-in-residence at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. (Thompson)

Then he had a chance to come to Hawaiʻi – and he stayed. An invitation to create a fresco at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, brought Charlot to Honolulu in 1949 where he painted Relation of Man and Nature in Old Hawai’i at Bachman Hall.

He accepted a position as professor of art at the University, and Hawai’i became the Charlot family’s permanent home. Attracted to the culture of the native Hawaiian, just as he had been interested in the folk aspects of the residents of rural France and the indigenous peoples of Mexico, he studied Hawaiian history, customs and religion, and learned the Hawaiian language.

From 1949 to 1979 Charlot created almost six hundred easel paintings, several hundred prints, and thirty-six works of art in public places in fresco, ceramic tile and sculpture. He taught summer sessions at several schools. (Thompson)

The architect, George James ‘Pete’ Wimberly, was born on January 16, 1915 in Ellensburg, Washington. He earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1937 from the University of Washington.

He served as a draftsman/designer in Seattle, Los Angeles and Phoenix, and in 1940 was in a civil service position as “journeyman architect doing naval work at Pearl Harbor.”

“At the end of World War II, there was a great backlog demand for buildings of all sorts. During the four years of war, only essential or defense-oriented projects were allowed.”

“Most of the architects at the time were not hurting because they were all doing defense work, either as private practitioners or as direct employees of the Armed Forces. (W)hen V-J Day was announced, I left the Navy Yard and never went back, except to pick up my pay check.” (Wimberly; WATG)

“I had an agreement with Howard (Loren) Cook (who was working on Tripler Hospital) that I would set up an office and we would split the take, his salary and my fees 50/50.”

“Fortunately, there was a great deal of work out there. Furthermore, I had the fortune to know Gardner Dailey on the mainland. He selected me as the local architect for the remodelling of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. (1946) … With this prestigious commission, we suddenly had credentials and were able to pick up other worthy jobs.” (Wimberly; WATG)

The artist and the architect got together in the design and construction of Charlot’s ‘dream house.’

It was part of the expansion of KahaIa in the 1950s. Before the expansion, Kahala was used mostly for beach homes along the shore, with another row of houses on the mauka side of Kahala Avenue. Bishop Estate opened up the balance of the area for residential and related development.

In recognition of his work in Hawaiian culture, Bishop Estate gave Charlot one of the first choices of the new lots. He picked the end lot of the three on the little appendix to Kahala Avenue, fronting the Wai‘alae Golf Course, the house sits on a flat lot bordered by the golf course on the north and a canal on the west.

The house was completed in 1958 as a true collaboration between Charlot and Wimberly. Charlot’s art and therefore his dream house had to fit its site. Wimberly also emphasized a ‘sense of place’ in his architecture and went on to build many structures that exuded this appropriateness to the lifestyle and climate of Hawai‘i.

Fitting into Hawai‘i’s lifestyle and climate is demonstrated in its open plan (the master bedroom overlooking the living room, only bedrooms and bathrooms are fully walled in,) blurred definition between the interior and exterior (the built-in dining table that connects to the exterior …

… the two story height glazed sections that connect to the lanai area, and the lanai with the same flooring material as the drawing room), incorporation of native arts (mural, petroglyph tiles), use of native materials (hapu’u) and siting by tradewinds. The house is an intensely personal one, yet a characteristic of Charlot’s art is its emphasis on appropriateness. (NPS)

It had a uniquely artistic flair, incorporating the openness and lanais of island homes with the vertical emphasis of traditional French rural ‘architecture and the brick floors and back courtyards of Mexican houses. (NPS)

Here, Charlot conducted most of his work in this house and more particularly in his 2nd floor studio. This was the final period of Charlot’s life, when he reached the peak of his artistic powers and was able to synthesize the esthetics of Europe, Mexico and Pacific Islands, the places he lived and influenced his art. His career spanned these places. Charlot remained active as an artist and a scholar until his death on March 20, 1979.

Wimberly also went on the great things. He invented a style of resort architecture that was creative, exotic and imaginative. His landmark projects helped define Hawai‘i tourism and created a Hawai‘i-based business designing resorts around the world.

Wimberly “established himself as perhaps the most successful resort architect in the world” and that his “Honolulu-based firm of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo (also known as WATG) designed many of the Pacific Rim’s pace-setting hotels and is the world’s largest ‘niche’ architecture firm, specializing in the $4-trillion-dollar travel industry.” (Honolulu Weekly) Wimberly died December 30, 1995.

Follow Peter T Young on Facebook

Follow Peter T Young on Google+

Follow Peter T Young on LinkedIn

Follow Peter T Young on Blogger

October 12, 2026 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

About the Time of Columbus

The first Europeans to arrive in North America were likely the Norse, traveling west from Greenland, where Erik the Red had founded a settlement around the year 985. In 1001 his son Leif is thought to have explored the northeast coast of what is now Canada and spent at least one winter there.

While Norse sagas suggest that Viking sailors explored the Atlantic coast of North America down as far as the Bahamas, such claims remain unproven. Later, the ruins of some Norse houses dating from that era were discovered at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in northern Newfoundland, thus supporting at least some of the claims the Norse sagas make.

About that same time in the Islands, using stratigraphic archaeology and refinements in radiocarbon dating, studies suggest it was between approximately AD 1000 and 1200 that “Polynesian explorers first made their remarkable voyage from central Eastern Polynesia Islands, across the doldrums and into the North Pacific, to discover Hawai‘i.” (Kirch)

Kamakau noted, in early Hawaiʻi “The parents were masters over their own family group … No man was made chief over another.” Essentially, the extended family was the socio, biological, economic, and political unit.

Kamakau states that there were no chiefs in the earliest period of settlement but that they came “several hundred years afterward … when men became numerous.”

As the population increased and wants and needs increased in variety and complexity (and it became too difficult to satisfy them with finite resources,) the need for chiefly rule became apparent.

As chiefdoms developed, the simple pecking order of titles and status likely evolved into a more complex and stratified structure.

Fast forward to Europe … Christopher Columbus left Spain in August, 1492, sailed directly westward, and in October came upon an outlying island of the West Indies. Although Columbus saw some of the other islands, he never touched the continent of North America.

Columbus (who was looking for a new route to India, China, Japan, and the ‘Spice Islands’ of Indonesia to bring back cargoes of silk and spices (ginger turmeric, and cinnamon)) never saw the mainland United States, but the first explorations of the continental United States were launched from the Spanish possessions that he helped establish.

At about the same time of Christopher Columbus crossing the Atlantic to America exciting stuff was happening here in the Hawaiian Islands.

The political governance and land management system by Aliʻi-ai-moku, was expanding and developing after two centuries since its inception, and there was a wake of progress taking place on our shores.

It was a natural progression, which began with three brothers as the first Aliʻi-ai-moku in the 12th century; Kumuhonua on Oʻahu, Olopana on Hawaiʻi, and Moikeha on Kauai, as grandsons of Maweke. (Yardley)

When they arrived from Tahiti with their new system, their first cousins were already serving as High Chiefs – “Laakona, High Chief of Ewa; Nuakea, Queen Consort of Molokai; Moi, kaula (prophet) of Molokai; and Hinakaimauliawa, High Chiefess of Koolau.” (Beckwith, Yardley)

Then, in the time of Columbus, the new Aliʻi-ai-moku were: Māʻilikūkahi on Oʻahu, Piʻilani on Maui, ʻUmi-a-Līloa on Hawaiʻi and Kukona on Kauai.

Several monumental actions were taking place in Hawaiʻi with a new form of land description, major infrastructure, an adaptive form of agriculture, and peaceful, chivalrous governance.

Māʻilikūkahi is noted for clearly marking and reorganizing land division palena (boundaries) on O‘ahu. Defined palena brought greater productivity to the lands; lessened conflict and was a means of settling disputes of future aliʻi who would be in control of the bounded lands; protected the commoners from the chiefs; and brought (for the most part) peace and prosperity.

According to oral tradition, Piʻilani unified the entire island of Maui, bringing together under one rule the formerly-competing eastern (Hāna) and western (Wailuku) multi-district kingdoms of the Island. Chief Piʻilani (“stairway to heaven”) unified West Maui and ruled in peace and prosperity. His territory included Nā Hono a Pi‘ilani, the six West Maui bays, a place he frequented.

Piʻilani’s prosperity was exemplified by a boom in agriculture and construction of heiau, fishponds, trails and irrigation systems. Famed for his energy and intelligence, Piʻilani constructed the West Maui phase of the noted Alaloa, or long trail (also known as the King’s Highway.)

On the Island of Hawaiʻi, ʻUmi-a-Līloa (ʻUmi) from Waipiʻo, son of Līloa, also started to divide the lands following this similar mauka-makai orientation.

ʻUmi also started a significant new form of agriculture in Kona; archaeologists call the unique method of farming in this area the “Kona Field System.” (These are long, narrow fields that ran along the contours, along the slopes of Mauna Loa and Hualālai; farmers then planted different crops, according to the respective rainfall gradients.)

The Kona Field System was described as “the most monumental work of the ancient Hawaiians.” The challenge of farming in Kona is to produce a flourishing agricultural economy in an area subject to frequent droughts, with no lakes or streams for irrigation.

Kukona (7th aliʻi ʻaimoku (high chief or king) of Kauai), whose name in Hawaiʻi became a symbol of the very highest ideals of chivalry in battle, was born in Kōloa and fought his defining battle at Po’ipū. His year of birth is estimated at around 1405.

Back on the Island of Hawai‘i there was eruption going on … the longest recorded eruption at Kilauea, arguably, was the ʻAilāʻau eruption and lava flow in the 15th century, which may be memorialized in the Pele-Hiʻiaka chant. It was the largest in Hawaiʻi in more than 1,000-years.

The flow was named after ʻAilāʻau – ʻAi means the “one who eats or devours.” Lāʻau means “tree” or a “forest.” ʻAilāʻau was, therefore, the forest eating (destroying) fire-god. Time and again he laid the districts of South Hawaii desolate by the lava he poured out from his fire-pits. (He was the fire god before Pele arrived at Hawaiʻi Island.)

The ʻAilāʻau eruption took place from a vent area just east of Kilauea Iki. The eruption built a broad shield. The eastern part of Kilauea Iki Crater slices through part of the shield, and red cinder and lava flows near the center of the shield can be seen on the northeastern wall of the crater.

The eruption probably lasted about 60 years. Such a long eruption naturally produced a large volume of lava, estimated to be about 5.2 cubic kilometers (1.25 cubic miles) after accounting for the bubbles in the lava. The rate of eruption is about the same as that for other long-lasting eruptions at Kilauea.

This large volume of lava covered a huge area, about 166 square miles (over 106,000-acres) – larger than the Island of Lānai. From the summit of the ʻAilāʻau shield, pāhoehoe lava flowed 25-miles northeastward, making it all the way to the coast.

Lava covered all, or most, of what are now Mauna Loa Estates, Royal Hawaiian Estates, Hawaiian Orchid Island Estates, Fern Forest Vacation Estates, Eden Rock Estates, Crescent Acres, Hawaiian Acres, Orchid Land Estates, ʻAinaloa, Hawaiian Paradise Park and Hawaiian Beaches. (USGS)