Missionaries from the isles ran Bay Area’s Mills College

Last week I wrote about a Maui boy who founded an East Coast college after serving in the Civil War. This week I have found a West Coast equivalent of sorts, and interestingly, both were visited by King David Kalakaua on his 1881 world tour.

It began when Sean Spencer wrote and asked me about Mills College in Oakland, Calif.

“My daughter recently played a volleyball match at Mills College and noticed that on the campus there was a street named Kapiolani Road and a building named Kapiolani Cottage.”

He asked me, “Do you know what the connection to Hawaii is?”

Mills College was founded by Mary Akins as the Young Ladies’ Seminary in Benicia, Calif., in 1852. It’s one of the oldest schools in California and the oldest women’s college west of the Rocky Mountains. As such, it was a convenient choice for isle families. Getting to East Coast schools took much longer.

Hawaii missionaries Cyrus and Susan Mills met Akins when she passed through Honolulu in 1863. Two years later, they bought the school for $5,000.

Cyrus Mills had been president of Oahu College (now called Punahou School), and Susan taught there from 1860 to 1864. Some believe she was the first woman on the faculty there.

His salary in Hawaii was $1,500 a year plus board, and hers was $450. That would be about $40,000 and $12,000 today.

If you pay attention to Hawaii history, you may recall that Julia Mills, wife of Samuel Damon, founded Mills Institute for Boys, which is now part of Mid-Pacific Institute. She was not related to Cyrus Mills.

In their biography, “The Story of Cyrus and Susan Mills,” author Elias Olan James says that Susan provided the students at Oahu College with their first Christmas tree and had presents for each student.

When they took over the leadership at Mills College in 1864, a stream of Hawaii girls followed and has continued ever since.

The Millses had met David Kalakaua when he was a prince in Hawaii. When Kalakaua visited the San Francisco Bay Area in 1872, Mills College girls, including several from Hawaii, greeted the future king at the train station with flowers and song.

Kalakaua spoke to them from the rear platform of the train, saying that “no honor had been paid to him in California that he appreciated more than this visit.”

Later, as part of his around-the-world tour in 1881, King Kalakaua visited the Mills College campus. A tea was held in his honor. One Southern woman, who was excited to meet an actual king, was aghast to find out he was “colored.”

Both times, the king was not with Kapiolani, his queen, but she managed a visit to Mills College on her own in 1887, when she was on her way to Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebration in London. Kapiolani was the first queen to visit America.

The journey stopped for a time in San Francisco. Queen Kapiolani, Princess Liliuokalani and several others visited Mills on April 23, 1887.

For Liliuokalani, it was her second visit. She had first been to Mills in 1878 to visit her two nieces. She was overwhelmed by the beauty of the campus and compared it to Honolulu. Now she was returning, this time with Queen Kapiolani.

“It took an hour to get to Mills Seminary,” James McGuire, a member of their party, later wrote. “Everything we saw was beautiful. There was this old schoolhouse, deep in a valley, adorned with climbing roses and fuchsia, and it was really beautiful to see.”

The two royals had met the Millses when they taught at Oahu College, and Susan Mills had tutored the future Queen Liliuokalani.

The relationship with the Millses inspired Liliuokalani to want to educate young Hawaiian women. She created a Liliuokalani Educational Society and desired to open a college for women in Washington Place, her home.

Maybe, if she had not been overthrown in 1893, it might have come to be. Instead, she paid for hundreds of women to be educated elsewhere.

So, were Kapiolani Road and Cottage named for the queen? Apparently not. As I mentioned in an earlier column (Aug. 26), there were two Kapiolanis. Queen Julia Kapiolani was named after her aunt, Chiefess Kapiolani.

High Chiefess Kapiolani was a second cousin of Kamehameha the Great. She converted to Christianity and became famous in 1824 for defying Madame Pele at Kilauea Volcano.

For this reason, Mills College named Kapiolani Road and Kapiolani Cottage in her honor.

There’s a Kapiolani Society at Mills, and it raised money in 1909 to build Kapiolani Cottage as an infirmary for the school. Today it’s a faculty residence.

The cottage was designed by architect Julia Morgan, who has her own connection to Hawaii: She designed the YWCA building on Richards Street in 1927.

It’s interesting to me that one small West Coast school has had five visits from three of our royals — King Kalakaua, and Queens Kapiolani and Liliuokalani. There was almost one more.

When looking at colleges for Princess Kaiulani, Mills College was under consideration, until her Scottish father decided Great Britain would be better.

If you know of another mainland college with similar royal connections, please write to me.

Bob Sigall, author of the Companies We Keep books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com