Punaluu | Page 2 | Images of Old Hawaiʻi

“The wonderful volcano of Kīlauea, on the island of Hawaii, is the great attractive of visitors. It is the only crater in the world that is constantly in action, and that can be safely approached at all times to the very edge of the precipice which encloses the boiling lava.”

“To reach Kīlauea necessitates a passage of thirty hours from Honolulu in a fine steamer to Hilo or Punalu‘u, then a ride of thirty miles in coaches takes visitors to a fine hotel, which overlooks the molten lava lake. It is a sight that will repay the effort and expense incurred ten times over, and one that will never be forgotten.” (Whitney)

“The Interisland steamer W G Hall, 380 tons burthen, leaves Honolulu alternate Tuesdays and Fridays, at 10 A. M. She is one of the best sea boats plying in our waters, and tourists will find her accomodations and table equal to any, while her officers and stewards are ever on the alert to supply all their wants.”

“(T)he steamer at once proceeds to Punalu‘u, the terminus of the sea route. This is usually reached about 6 P. M. The passengers are landed in boats and will proceed to the Punalu‘u hotel, where they will find themselves comfortably taken care of.” (Whitney)

Lee set upon this venture with the idea of popularizing the Punalu‘u-Pahala route to Kilauea. In 1891, Peter Lee, an enterprising pioneer with an eye to the future, built a 24-mile wagon road from Pahala to Kilauea, following by seven years the construction of a hotel at Punalu‘u, which then became a third takeoff point. (NPS)

“The hotel is clean, the table good, and the proprietor will be found very obliging and ready to afford any information required.” (Whitney)

“Early in the morning the start for the Volcano is made. The first five miles are done by rail to Pahala, where the Hawaiian Agricultural Company have a large plantation and a fine mill. The fields extend far up the hillside and the constant moving of wagons, riders and gangs of men makes a busy scene.” (Whitney)

“At Pahala a coach will be found ready to convey the tourists to the Volcano. The road passes through a pleasant grassy country with the tree-clad slopes of Mauna Loa lying to the left, while to the right glimpses of the sea and the lower land are occasionally caught.” Whitney)

“The Half-way House is reached in about three hours. Here a lunch is prepared for the travelers, and a short rest is given to the animals. The air becomes cooler as the coach advances, and a pleasant ride of seven hours through a country abounding in pretty scenery brings the party to the vicinity of the Volcano House.”

“The smoke which forever overhangs this wonder of nature will have been pointed out by the guide, long before the crater is reached. About a mile from the Volcano House, a first view into the crater is obtained. By daylight the sight is by no means so striking as at night, but enough can be seen to excite wonder in the beholder.” (Whitney)

“For a number of years the Government road from Pahala in Kā‘u, to the Volcano has been practically abandoned, and a private road built and owned by Mr. Lee has been generally traveled.” (Minister of the Interior Report, 1894)

The best estimate for the date of completion of Peter Lee’s Road comes from a Volcano House register entry dated October 1888 by a guest who claimed to be the first visitor to travel by means of a wheeled conveyance the entire way from an ocean port to the volcano.

It is possible that the road was finished earlier, or that the segment that finally connected the two roads was completed before the entire road was fit for travel. (NPS)

In correspondence from Lee to Thurston, Lee notes, “I am just now making a carriage road to the Volcano on the Kā‘u side, which road will be completed in a few weeks, Several competent people have overlooked this road and are highly recommending it.”

“As I have been employed for several years in road building in Peru and California, I am thoroughly familiar with this kind of work, and am confident that I can make this road as good and cheap, and in as short a time as anybody in the country.” (Lee to Thurston, September 22, 1888; Maly)

However, the construction of the Volcano Road from Hilo had begun. With the completion of the Hilo to Volcano Road in 1894, four-horse stagecoaches came into the picture, reducing the travel time from Hilo from two days to six and one-half hours, and Hilo became the principal departure point for Kilauea. (NPS)

Back to Peter Lee’s road … “The Legislature of 1892 passed an appropriation for the purchase of this road, and practically it was turned over to the Government in December, 1892; but the formal transfer was only completed in January, 1894. The purchase price being $4,500.” (Minister of the Interior Report, 1894)

“This is the main road for travel between the districts of Hilo and Kau, and until last October was the only road by which carriages could go to the Volcano.”

“Nothing has been done on the road by way of repairs for a long time, and it is now a very uncomfortable carriage road. The Kau Road Board should be instructed to put it in order, and in addition, certain portions crossing the lava flows should be regraded and reconstructed, and finished with the traction engine now in use on the Volcano road.” (Minister of the Interior Report, 1894)

Peter Lee sold the Punalu‘u Hotel to the new buyers of the Volcano House; he managed both hotels for them.

From the early 1900s, prisoners at Namakanipaio worked on rebuilding the “Peter Lee Road” into Kaʻū, and on roads and trails around the Kilauea, and towards Puna. The prison site was closed shortly after 1915. (Maly)

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Fern Forest Road to the volcano from Punaluu, Hawaii Island-PP-28-13-008

Punaluu-S00084-1880

Suspected Peter Lee Road Marker noting completion-Aug 1887-NPS

KilaueaCrater_USGS_Quadrangle-KilaueaCrater-1922-portion-Peter Lee Road

Punaluʻu i ke kai kau haʻa a ka malihini
Punaluʻu, where the sea dances for the visitors.

“The coast of Kaoo (Kaʻū) presents a prospect of the most horrid and dreary kind: the whole country appearing to have undergone a total change from the effects of some dreadful convulsion.”

“The ground is every where covered with cinders and intersected in many places with black streaks, which seem to mark the course of a lava that has flowed, not many ages, back, from the mountain Roa [Mauna Loa] to the shore.”

“The southern promontory looks like the mere dregs of a volcano. The projecting headland is composed of broken and craggy rocks, piled irregularly on one another, and terminating in sharp points.” (King Captain Cook’s Journal. 1779)

Henry ʻŌpūkahaʻia was born around 1792 in the area between Punaluʻu and Nīnole. At the age of 16, after his parents had been killed, he boarded a sailing ship anchored in Kealakekua Bay and sailed to the continent. “Memoirs of Henry Obookiah” (the spelling of his name prior to establishment of the formal Hawaiian alphabet, based on its sound) was published.

ʻŌpūkahaʻia, inspired by many young men with proven sincerity and religious fervor of the missionary movement, had wanted to spread the word of Christianity back home in Hawaiʻi; his book, a compilation of his writing, inspired the Pioneer Company of missionaries to sail to Hawaiʻi (October 23, 1819.)

In June 1823, William Ellis joined American Missionaries Asa Thurston, Artemas Bishop and Joseph Goodrich on a tour of the island of Hawaiʻi to investigate suitable sites for mission stations.

Coming from Waiʻōhinu, Ellis noted, “The country appeared more thickly inhabited, than that over which we had travelled in the morning. The villages along the sea-shore were near together, and some of them extensive.”

The following is his perspective on the area at ‘Punaruu’ (Punaluʻu.) “(W)e came to Punaruu, where the people of that and the next village, Wailau, collected together in a large house, and were addressed by one of the company, on the nature and attributes of the true God.”

“We generally preferred speaking to the people in the open air, as we then had more hearers, than when we addressed them in a house. But in the middle of the day, we usually found it too hot to stand so long in the sun. The services, which we held in the morning and evening, were -always out of doors.”

“We now left the road by the sea-side, and directed our course towards the mountains. Our path lay over a rich yellow looking soil of decomposed lava, or over a fine vegetable mould, in which we occasionally saw a few masses of lava partially decomposed.”

“There was but little cultivation, though the ground appeared well adapted to the growth of any of the produce of the islands. After walking up a gentle ascent, about eight miles, we came to a solitary hamlet, called Makaʻaka, containing four or five houses in which three or four families were residing.” (Ellis, 1823)

During the 1830s, Protestant missionaries from Kona and Hilo would make occasional visits into Kaʻū but a permanent missionary presence would not be installed until the early-1840s when Catholic and Protestant missions were established in the district.

In 1842, the Protestant minister John Paris settled in Waiʻōhinu where he founded a church and school. In 1843, Rev. Paris reported that a stone meeting house (church) had been built at Punaluʻu and that the school’s average attendance there was 140. (Paris preached three Sundays each month at Waiʻōhinu and one Sunday at Punaluʻu.) Cultural Surveys)

Chester H Lyman in 1846, coming south from Volcano through the ʻōhiʻa forest of tree ferns and below Kilauea, passed through Kapapala, where he encountered dwellings and canoe-making sheds, the first such to be seen on descending the mountain.

He was impressed with the green hills, the moist state of the soil, the “several horses with cattle and goats” feeding near the chief’s house; and “the fires of Kilauea which shone up magnificently on the clouds like the light of a conflagration at evening.

Punaluʻu village he found “romantically situated on the beach, shut in in part by a rough lava stream.” Continuing along the shore, he passed the black-pebble beach of Nīnole and found “a succession of small villages” whose inhabitants were “extensively engaged in fishing.” (Handy)

While cattle and goats were the focus of commercial agriculture in the region in the 1850s, wheat growing was attempted in Kaʻū; but it proved difficult to co-ordinate the size of the wheat crop with the requirements of the flour mills. The business did not become a permanent one. (Kuykendall)

Life in Kaʻū during the 1860s was disrupted and devastated by the forces of nature. In March of 1868 began a sequence of major earthquakes and eruptions of Mauna Loa, a prelude to an earthquake in early April that precipitated an “earthquake and the tidal wave destroying the villages from Punaluʻu to Kaʻaluʻalu (north-east of South Point.”) (Handy)

Then, sugar changed the regional landscape. Alexander Hutchinson established the Hutchinson Sugar Company (1868) and Hawaiian Agricultural Company, was established in Pāhala (1876,) the latter used Punaluʻu as its port.

The railroad from Punaluʻu to the village of Keaiwa (where the Pāhala Sugar Mill was located) was reported in June 1878 to be “the first railroad in these islands”. Railroads continued to operate in Kaʻū until the 1940s but the Pāhala – Punaluʻu railroad was discontinued in 1929. (Cultural Surveys)

Starting in the late-1800s, to get people and goods around the Islands, folks would catch steamer ships; competitors Wilder Steamship Co (1872) and Inter-Island Steam Navigation Co (1883) ran different routes, rather than engage in head to head competition.

For Inter-Island’s routes, vessels left Honolulu stopping at Lāhainā and Māʻalaea Bay on Maui and then proceeding directly to Kailua-Kona.

From Kailua, the steamer went south stopping at the Kona ports of Nāpoʻopoʻo on Kealakekua Bay, Hoʻokena, Hoʻopuloa, rounding South Point, touching at the Kaʻū port of Honuʻapo and finally arriving at Punaluʻu, Kaʻū, the terminus of the route. (From Punaluʻu, five mile railroad took passengers to Pāhala and then coaches hauled the visitors to the volcano from the Kaʻū side.)

The Punaluʻu Harbor and Landing served the communities of Punaluʻu and Nīnole and the sugar plantation at Pāhala and was considered the “port town for the district in 1880.” (Orr) By the mid-1880s Punaluʻu had storehouses, a restaurant, a store, and numerous homes constructed of lumber. (Cultural Surveys)

C Brewer & Company acquired the sugar interests in the Pāhala to Nīnole-Punaluʻu area that were merged into Kaʻū Sugar (the last harvest was in 1996;) Brewer also went into macadamia nuts and other ventures.

Between 1969-1972, at Nīnole and Punaluʻu, C Brewer Properties, Ltd developed the Sea Mountain 18-hole golf course community, which included the Colony I condominium project, Kalana I single-family residential subdivision, the Aspen Institute Center for Humanistic Studies, the Black Sands Restaurant and the Kaʻū Center for History and Culture.

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