Edgar Young | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

In January 1900, Herb and Will Young started Young Brothers. They purchased a small launch, the Billy, and made a business running lines for the ships, delivering foodstuffs to the crews, and ferrying passengers. They were joined in October by their younger brother, Jack Young.

“Honolulu, which for so many years had served sailing vessels with rowboats and native canoes, was quick to take up the power launch, and we went in and out of the harbor with passengers, meat, mail and the Customs men.”

“The Honolulu waterfront of thirty years ago was known throughout the Pacific. Ships from around the Horn were loaded with general merchandise, railroad and sugar mill supplies; the vessels from California had live stock on the decks and were full of farm produce from the Coast; ships from Newcastle, Australia, held cargoes of coal for the sugar plantations.”

“Here they would discharge their cargoes, and take full loads of sugar for California, or around the Horn to Delaware Water Gap.”

“The finest ships afloat came into Honolulu, everything from the trimmest bark to the full-rigged ships. There were not enough loading wharves for them all, and many were forced to anchor in Rotten Row inside the harbor until their turn came.”

“Sailors coming ashore always had a payroll. They went to live in boarding houses until putting out to sea again, and invariably demanded and got advance wages, always spent before they left.”

“The town, of perhaps ten thousand, was always active. Rum and gin and whiskey flowed freely. Native liquors were as popular with many as whole shiploads of gin from Holland.”

“Kanaka women could drink the gin down just like water, and frequently did. The square-bodied gin bottle was as well known on the waterfront wharves as the brown-skinned Kanakas, and cases of gin would be stacked as high as the wharf roofs.”

“The boarding-house men saw to it that sailors were kept supplied with liquor, so that by the time their shore leave was up a fine bill held them ashore as hostages. Captains cordially hated the boarding-house keepers, for when sailing time came, blood money at so much per head was the only sure way to retrieve their sailors, drunk or sober.”

“Our tug, loaded with outward bound crews, made short work of delivering its hilarious cargo to the ships, where, in a few hours, the men would wake with big heads. But a fair wind soon blew the cobwebs out of their brains.”

“Young Brothers’ Boathouse, where we lived, near the harbor entrance, was the center of information along the waterfront. From this point of vantage, everything going in or out, or approaching, was seen by those of us on duty at the Boathouse.”

“Two or three launchmen and a couple of deckhands were sure to be found about the place besides ourselves, and we were on twenty-four-hour service with the Customs people and Immigration Service.”

“In front were moored our boats, the Fun, the Billy, the Brothers and the Huki Huki. Alongside was warped the Water Witch, a fifty-footer used for Customs work. This boat, brought down by Archie Young, for whom we went to work at first on Oahu, is still in service after thirty-two strenuous years.”

“Before the advent of radio, it was our six-inch telescope atop the lookout on the Boathouse which kept the harbor informed of incoming steamers as far away as Pearl Harbor.”

“From the first, our telephone was constantly ringing; the newspapers, hotel guests, Customs men, wanting information of every sort.”

“While we were carrying on our various waterfront activities, delivering supplies to all ships at anchor every day we had an opportunity of making friends with all the captains who came to Honolulu, and slowly became a part of the life of the harbor.”

Then, “A change had come over the firm of Young Brothers”.

“Herb, independent and capable, had been involved in so many differences of opinion that he found it best suited to his own interests and those of the business to get out. He went to California, becoming associated with the growing tuna fishing industry around San Diego, where he was captain of the big power schooner Elsinore for eight or ten years.”

“Honolulu by this time was no longer the town of our early days, and Big Business was making itself felt even in the towboat business.”

“Young Brothers was incorporated [1913], and for the first time someone outside the family directed activities. As there seemed to be no immediate need for me among my old associates, I began to cast about for an opportunity to realize my hopes that shark hides could be made commercially useful.”

Will preferred to pursue his fascination with sharks and eventually left the islands for good in 1921 to become a well-known international shark hunter.

William left Young Brothers in the hands of Jack, the last founding member of the company to remain in Hawai‘i. (Lots of information here is from William Young’s book Shark Shark, Young Brothers: 100 Years of Service, and a Young family background and genealogy.)

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.