General | Page 78 | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

January 1, 2023 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Happy New Year!!!

When we were kids, we weren’t allowed to set off fireworks.

Our parents told us our uncle had lost an eye and they wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to us.

It never dawned on me, then; but, I never had an uncle with one eye … hmmm.

I still can’t believe we bit that one. (It is right up there with my sister convincing her kids that it was “white chocolate milk” in their glasses.)

Anyway, we only did sparklers – now, you can’t even do that.

I realize it is simply a change in the movement on the clock and the turning of the page on the calendar, but we still celebrate this change with anticipation and optimism.

Happy New Year, everyone!!!

December 28, 2022 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Edgar Young

The year was 1900 when William and Herb Young arrived in Hawai’i to enter this promising new line of business.

At the tum of the century, Honolulu’s waterfront was well known throughout the Pacific, being as the Territory of Hawai‘i had been annexed to the United States in 1898, and its largest city was the port of call for vessels east- and west-bound.

Ships came around the Horn laden with general merchandise; vessels from the West Coast might be carrying produce or livestock, while those from Australia carried coal.

In Honolulu, they would discharge their cargoes, then load up with sugar bound for distant ports. Interisland trade was serviced by local steamship companies with a combined fleet of eighteen vessels, plus a “mosquito fleet” of independent operators that owned interisland vessels.

The Young brothers weren’t strangers in the harbor life that awaited them. The family hailed from San Diego – four boys, Herb, William, Jack and Edgar, and older sister, Edith. The family patriarch, John Nelson Young, was a sailor.

The boys must have inherited this nautical bent because, at an early age, they were hiring themselves out for fishing trips using a small skiff that they sailed around the bay.

In the summer of 1899, all four boys ran a glass-bottomed boat excursion at Catalina Island. After the season ended, Herb landed a berth on a schooner bound for the Hawaiian Islands, and William decided to join him on what he would later call ‘the great adventure.’

They had made passage on the Surprise, a two-masted schooner engaged as an interisland carrier to serve the Kona Sugar Company. Twenty-nine year old Herb had served as chief engineer during the ten-day journey from San Francisco, while William, then age twenty-five, served before the mast.

The company that was to become Young Brothers began as a an enterprising series of small jobs utilizing skills that Herb and William added to along the way.

By the end of the year, Young Brothers was becoming established as a small but prospering harbor business. Younger brother Jack, age eighteen at the time, had arrived on October 16, 1900, to join the growing partnership.

Then steps in a fledgling Hawaiʻi company, also seeing expansion opportunities, and it was through shipment of Libby’s pineapple from Molokai to Libby’s processing plant in Honolulu that Young Brothers expanded into the freight business.

In the early years of the company, the brothers carried supplies and sailors to ships at anchor outside the harbor, as well as run lines for anchoring or docking vessels. They also gave harbor tours and took paying passengers to participate in shark hunts.

Libby’s need to ship fruit from the growing area on Molokai, to pineapple processing on Oʻahu created an opportunity for the brothers. The brothers, using their first wooden barges, YB1 and YB2, hauled pineapples from Libby’s wharf to Honolulu. “That’s how (Young Brothers) started the freight.” (Jack Young Jr)

Youngest of all, Edgar (who was born January 21, 1885 in San Diego), arrived in July 1901, but being only fifteen at the time, he attended Honolulu High School. (YB 100 yrs)

Graduating high school in 1904, Edgar then sailed aboard the ‘Alameda’ on July 27, 1904 for San Francisco to attend Cooper Medical Cooper. Newspaper accounts note that Edgar reported safe from the 1906 earthquake and fire.

(In 1908, Cooper Medical College was transferred to Stanford University. Instruction by Stanford University began in 1909 and continued in San Francisco until 1959, at which time the Stanford School of Medicine opened on the Stanford campus.)

On Marcy 9, 1907, Edgar married Eunice Mae Hilts. Then, Edgar returned to the Islands, “Dr. Young is a graduate of the Cooper Medical School of San Francisco, and while in that city he had a laboratory of his own.”

“Dr. Edgar Young, who graduated eight years ago from the Honolulu High School, and well known in Honolulu by the young people of the city, has taken up practise at Kahului.”

“He is under regular appointment by the railroad and will be given some of the work of Puunene plantation, which was too heavy for one physician to carry alone. It is likely, too, that when he can spare the time, he will be called to Wailuku to assist in that part of Maui, where the work also is unusually exacting, and demands more time than one physician can usually give.”

“His coming to Maui is much appreciated by the other physicians here as well as the people as a whole. He has brought with him his wife and child. A new house will probably be erected in Kahului on the beach on the Wailuku side of the cottage occupied by Elmer R. Bevins.” (Star Bulletin, August 12, 1912)

Edgar later substituted for Dr Durney at the Kula Sanitarium. (SB, Sept 19, 1917) Edgar went to Kauai and in addition to general medical practice, he was superintendent of the 35-bed Lihue Hospital (American Medical Directory (1921)).

“He practiced in Hawaii for many years [on Kauai (including Lihue Plantation) and Maui (including Kahului RR Co)]. He left Honolulu for California just before outbreak of war in December, 1941. Owing to ill health, he had been inactive for the past four years.” (Star-Bulletin, Dec 27, 1943)

Edgar Young died on December 23, 1943 (polio ‘finished him’ (Jack Young Jr), in San Diego, at the age of 58, and was buried in Cypress View Mausoleum And Crematory in San Diego.

December 26, 2022 by Peter T Young 1 Comment

Sisters of Charity

Appropriately, we read a lot about the good work of Father Damien and Mother Marianne (both, now Saints.) But we don’t seem to hear of the many others who worked with them in ministering to those in need.

Here, we look at only a few (some of the earliest Sisters that worked with Mother Marianne,) and the hard work and hardship they endured.

The first shipment of lepers landed at Kalawao (Kalaupapa) January 6, 1866, the beginning of segregation and banishment of lepers to the leper settlement.

Receiving and detention centers were established on Oʻahu. Kalihi Hospital was the first hospital for leprosy patients in Hawaiʻi opening in 1865. Kapiʻolani Home opened in Kalihi Kai in 1891 adjacent to the Kalihi Hospital and Receiving Station; Kalihi Plague Camp (1900-1912) and Meyers Street, Kalihi Uka (1912-1938.) (NPS)

In January 1883, Walter Gibson, Minister of Foreign Affairs and president of the Board of Health, appealed to Hermann Koeckemann, Bishop of Olba, head of the Catholic Mission in Hawai’i, 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.

Father Leonor Fouesnel, with a royal commission from King Kalākaua, was designated as agent to go on this mission. Landing in San Francisco and traveling East, Father Leonor petitioned more than fifty different sisterhoods before a favorable reply was obtained, from the Franciscan Convent of St Anthony at Syracuse, New York.

The reply to the King’s emissary was not made lightly, but only after a long, serious debate among the sisterhood. One of the prime supporters of this action was the Mother Superior, Mother Marianne Cope. (Greene; NPS)

“I am hungry for the work and I wish with all my heart to be one of the chosen Ones, whose privilege it will be, to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the souls of the poor Islanders… I am not afraid of any disease, hence it would be my greatest delight even to minister to the abandoned ‘lepers.’” (Mother Marianne; NPS)

Mother Marianne consulted with all the sisters and, to her credit they felt free to voice their concerns. Responded one: “I am very honest with you. I am afraid. I have heard too much about these poor people. I heard also that there are no rules and regulations. That everyone does as he pleases.”

Another stated: “If it is not a suitable place for any woman how can it be for the Sisters.” (NPS) With calmness, good sense, firmness, and a kind heart she was able to get cooperation from all around her. Her religious life was a series of administrative appointments, culminating in her being placed in charge of missions in Hawai’i.

Only six sisters could be spared to go with Mother Marianne, who insisted that as superior of the convent it was her duty to go with the first group of sisters and help them get established. It was not the intent of the convent that she stay in Hawai’i permanently. (Greene; NPS)

On October 23, 1883, Mother Marianne and her companions set off for Hawai’i, arriving on November 9. These were: Sister M Bonaventure Caraher, Sister Crescentia Eilers, Sister Ludovica Gibbons, Sister M Rosalia McLaughlin, Sister Renata Nash and Sister Mary Antonella Murphy.

Three of the sisters and Mother Marianne went to work at the branch hospital for leprosy victims at Kaka’ako in Honolulu on January 11, 1884, and spent almost five years there. Three others were put in charge of the new hospital at Wailuku on the island of Maui.

“For us it is happiness to be able to comfort, in a measure, the poor exiles, and we rejoice that we are unworthy agents of our heavenly Father through whom He deigns to show His great love and mercy to the sufferers.” (Mother Marianne, 1884)

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. (KCC) She and others also recognized the need for a home for the non-infected children of the leprosy patients.

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. (Hawaii Catholic Herald)

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.)

News continually filtered back to Kaka’ako about conditions at the Moloka’i settlement. The children on the island were in desperate need of care and the venerable Father Damien himself had been diagnosed as having leprosy and obviously had few years left in which to continue his work.

Mother Marianne, however, was being kept busy in Honolulu all this time. At one point she had suggested to Walter Gibson that a home for children of leprous parents be built near the sisters’ residence in Honolulu. This establishment opened in November 1885 as the Kapiʻolani Home for Girls. (Green; NPS)

Then, Mother Marianne Cope and Sisters Leopoldina Burns and Vincentia McCormick of the Third Order of St. Francis, Sisters of Charity arrived on November 14, 1888. They managed the Charles R Bishop Home for Unprotected Leper Girls and Women, which opened at Kalaupapa in 1888. (NPS)

Sister Leopoldina describes the place: “One could never imagine what a lonely barren place it was. Not a tree nor a shrub in the whole Settlement only in the churchyard there were a few poor little trees that were so bent and yellow by the continued sweep of the birning wind it would make one sad to look at them.” (Voices of Kaulapapa; SanDiego-gov)

While there was no cure for the residents of Molokai, the sisters tried to bring dignity to their lives. Before the sisters arrived, patients dressed in rags. The sisters gave the girls proper clothes and taught them embroidery, sewing and gardening. They also gave them music lessons.

Father Damien himself succumbed to leprosy on April 15, 1889. Upon the death of Damien, Mother Marianne agreed to also head the Boys Home at Kalawao. The Board of Health had quickly chosen her as Saint Damien’s successor and she was thus enabled to keep her promise to him to look after his boys.

A traveler on a steamer that later (May, 1889) brought Sisters Crescentia and Irene to Kalaupapa noted, “When I was pulled ashore one early morning there sat with me in the boat two sisters bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human life. One wept silently and I could not withhold myself from joining her.” (The Messenger)

The workload was extremely heavy in that Bishop Home alone provided shelter for 103 girls in 1893. There were times when the burden seemed overwhelming. In a moment of despair, Sister Leopoldina reflected, “How long Oh Lord must I see only those that are sick and covered with leprosy?” (Sister Leopoldina: NPS)

The Baldwin Home, which opened in May of 1894, replaced the Boys’ home built by Father Damien. Mother Marianne Cope and the Sisters of Saint Francis managed the Baldwin home until they turned over jurisdiction to Joseph Dutton and the Sacred Hearts Brothers in 1895.

While at Kalaupapa, Mother Marianne predicted that no Franciscan Sister would ever contract leprosy. Additionally she required her sisters use stringent hand washing and other sanitary procedures. No sister has ever contracted the disease. Mother Marianne died in the summer of 1918 at the age of 80.

Mother Marianne was canonized on Oct. 21, 2012, making her the first Franciscan woman to be canonized from North America and only the 11th American saint. Forevermore, she will be known as St Marianne Cope, with the title “beloved mother of outcasts.” (Lots of information here is from NPS and Hawaii Catholic Herald.)

Gibson with the Sisters of St. Francis and daughters of Hansen’s disease patients, at the Kakaako Branch Hospital-1886

Sr. M. Rosalia, Sr. M Martha, Sr M. Leopoldina, Sr. M Charles, Sr. M. Crescentia, and Mother Marianne rear-Walter Murray Gibson-1886

Mother Marianne Cope (in wheelchair) with other nuns and the women and girls of Bishop Home in Kalaupapa, Hawaii, shortly before her death in 1918.

Mother_Marianne_Cope_in_her_youth

Sisters (Mother Marianne center) and patients at the Bishop Home in Kalaupapa

Kakaako Branch Hospital-Patients’ Cottage-Hanley&Bushnell-1886

Beginnings of the Kalaupapa Leprosy Colony

Kalaupapa peninsula on the island of Molokai

Rebuilt-Kapiolani_Home

Charles R Bishop Home for Unprotected Girls and Women-Kalaupapa, Molokai-1900

Old Settlement at Kalawao

Mother_Marianne_Cope,_Kalaupapa,_1899

Malulani_Hospital-women’s_ward-(MauiNews)

Kapiolani_Home

Kalawao-Kalaupapa

Kalaupapa home for unprotected girls

Bishop Home for Unprotected Leper Girls

Edward_Clifford_–_Damien_in_1888

December 23, 2022 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Animal Drawn Streetcars

In the quarter century from 1872 to 1896 the population just about doubled in the kingdom from 57,000 to 109,000; Honolulu doubled from 15,000 to 30,000.

The increase of the population of Honolulu was taken care of in two ways: (1) more people crowded into Chinatown (the area between Fort Street and Nuʻuanu stream makai (seaward) of Beretania Street and (2) area of settlement was pushed outward and “downtown” enlarged. (Kuykendall)

This extension of settlement combined with the growing attraction and popular resort use in Waikīkī meant transportation became more of a problem.

People who could afford them had horses and buggies; independent buggy served as available on a limited basis and mass production of the gas automobiles didn’t get underway until the turn of the century, so a more organized public transportation system was needed.

The earliest public transit was the Pioneer Omnibus Line, with a horse-pulled vehicle serving parts of Honolulu for a few years beginning in the spring of 1868. (Schmitt)

In 1884, the legislature passed a law “granting to William R. Austin and his associates the right to construct and operate a street railroad upon certain streets of the city of Honolulu.” Later amended, the law granted authority the Hawaiian Tramways Company, Limited (from England.) (Kuykendall)

An April 14 1888 London public offering prospectus to raise £130,000 by selling 26,000 shares at £5 each noted, “The following are the routes of the proposed lines of Tramway, viz.;

(1) From Nuuanu Street, the chief residential quarter, through the business part of the City skirting the Docks and Custom House, to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, and thence along Beretania Street, touching the extensive Portuguese quarter, to a point where at several closely populated Avenues converge.

(2) Starting from the densely-populated Chinese quarter, past the King’s Palace, the Legislative Chambers, the Opera House, and the Native Church, to the principal pleasure resorts and residential district of the well to-do classes in the southern suburbs.

The total length of the above lines, including sidings and crossings will be about 12 miles.”

On May 19, 1888, ground was broken and track laying started for a street railway system. On New Year’s Day 1889, a mule or horse-drawn tram along King Street between Pālama and Pawaʻa became the first streetcar in Honolulu with four open cars, bringing what was later described as “Honolulu’s first real transit service.” (Schmitt)

The Pacific Commercial Advertiser grumbled that it was “a very unsatisfactory service for the public, however, as hundreds waited at the corners for the belated cars …. The company should have had double the cars on the line that it had.” (Kuykendall)

The tramcars were well patronized, first as a novelty and then as a proven convenience. The speed limit for the cars was eight miles per hour. By July 1889, the trams speeded along King Street from Kalihi to Waikīkī, Beretania from Nuʻuanu to Punahou.

The streetcar tracks added to the traffic problem on Honolulu’s main streets, none of which were wide enough. As far back as 1880, a newspaper article gave an entertaining description of traffic conditions then existing.

“The traffic in ours streets has increased five-fold within the last three or four years, but the streets are no wider than before. It therefore behooves the police to keep a sharp lookout. …”

“In all great cities which we have visited, it is held to be a most important function of the police, to render locomotion as easy and safe as possible, by forbidding unnecessary stoppages, keeping drivers on their own side of the street, seeing that no heavy drays or wagons are allowed to move unless the drivers have sufficient control over their beast.” (Kuykendall)

The animal-powered service was short-lived, making its last run on December 23, 1903; Hawaiian Tramways, Ltd. was taken over in 1900 by the Honolulu Rapid Transit & Land Co.

Honolulu Rapid Transit operated electrically powered buses on Honolulu streets. Power came from overhead wires. Ten new buses began service on August 31, 1901, replacing the horse and mule drawn cars which had in service 33 horse cars, 113 horses and 194 mules.

Eventually more comfortable, speedy gasoline-powered buses replaced other means of mass transit for Honolulu and rural Oʻahu.

December 20, 2022 by Peter T Young Leave a Comment

Three Volcano Pioneers of the Mid-19th Century Hawaii

“Keep and publish careful records, invite the whole world of science to co-operate, and interest the business man.” (Jaggar)

The efficiency of an institution which is essentially educational and not commercial, productive of ideas rather than dollars, must be measured by its effect on productive men of learning in stimulating them to production; that is, to new discovery, experiment investigation and publication.

The founding of the Volcano Observatory and the formation of the group of subscribers here called the “Research Association,” were themselves evolved productions of the inspiring work of early investigators, as well as of the natural intellectual stimulus created in man by the unexplained Kilauea lake of boiling nebulous flux.

Three names stand out above all others as recorders of the work of the Fire Goddess in Hawaii in the middle decades of the nineteenth century : Titus Coan, James Dwight Dana, and William Lowthian Green.

Coan the missionary, earnest seeker after truth, for more than a third of the century watched every detail of the evolution of the volcanoes, pondered their meaning, and moreover made truthful record in scores of letters which were promptly published.

This genius for recording is rare among men, and is an all-important requirement in science; many men are good observers, but millions of valuable observations are forever lost, because of a lack of appreciation of the value of a jotting down – day, hour, minute, event, stages, appearances.

All science is no more than a categoric jotting-down, and the grouping of facts into new categories, until some of these reach the dignity of “theory.”

Coan without apparatus or endowment was an institution, a first Hawaiian volcano observatory, and in actual output he was a better observer and recorder than some institutions which have been elaborately equipped.

Professor Dana of Yale, foremost American geologist, was with the Wilkes Expedition at Kilauea in 1840, revisited Hawaii later, and wrote in 1891 a book, “Characteristics of Volcanoes,” which stands preeminent among volcano memoirs.

It was inspired by Kilauea and Mauna Loa, but is broad and sane, and presents a most painstaking and thoughtful summary of the progress of Hawaiian volcanic events, and their bearing on geology. Dana published in New Haven Coan’s letters, and it was doubtless Dana who stimulated much of Coan’s recording.

Green, the man of business, in his leisure moments student of volcanic life and of the inspiring heights and depths of the globe, conceived: to scale, with its film of waters and its blanket of gas, wrote a remarkable book in two volumes, “Vestiges of the Molten Globe.”

His second volume deals especially with the volcanoes, which he visited many times, and of it Professor Daly of Harvard writes: “It is certainly a pity that the second part of Green’s work is not more generally known. The book is almost as remarkable a contribution to the philosophy of vulcanism as Part 1, ‘On the Tetrahedral Theory of the Earth,’ is important in cosmogonic philosophy.”

Green’s work foreshadowed theoretic conceptions which modem thought has fixed more firmly, and his interest, as a business man, in the affairs of pure science was forerunner of the wider interest of many business men (and intelligent women) of Hawaii who now make up the Hawaiian Volcano Research Association.

These three men, Coan and Green resident here, Dana from an eastern university, typify the reason for the creation of an Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, and their portraits should forever hang in honored place upon its walls.

Coan, the systematic observer, showed the value of record and system; Green, the merchant, fascinated by the spell of Pele and inspired by the problems of position of this mid-Pacific pinnacle, Hawaii, rising 37,000 feet above the ocean deep, adopted volcanology for avocation, and left monumental work to inspire specialist and layman alike.

While Dana the scholar, coming from a distant seat of learning, hospitably entertained in the islands by Coan, Green, Bishop, Brigham, Alexander and a host of kind friends, rewarded their kindness by making famous to the whole world the achievements of his Hawaiian scientific colleagues.

Dana added new volcano lore and illustrated what production may come from scientific hospitality. (All here is copied from Special Bulleting of Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, 1913, as stated by Thomas Jaggar.)