Museum harks back to West Maui’s plantation days

A rusty washing machine, a rotary-dial telephone, a typewriter in its weathered case — you might not think such obsolete items would be worth a second look. But they provide valuable insight into West Maui’s plantation era — from 1860 when Pioneer Mill Co., one of Hawaii’s first sugar plantations, was founded, to 2009 when the area’s pineapple production ceased.

For years, the board of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation had discussed preserving such memorabilia in a museum before they were lost or discarded. The concept gelled in 2009 when the organization began restoring Pioneer Mill’s smokestack and launched Plantation Days, an event that recalled a time when sugar and pineapple were the backbone of Hawaii’s economy.

The foundation ran the event for seven years with the last one in 2015. Among its draws each year was a historical exhibit that re-­created rooms from a typical plantation home from the early- to mid-1900s. When word spread that the foundation was seeking donations for the displays and a new museum, people came forward with things that had sat for decades, nearly forgotten, beneath their homes and in closets, yards and garages — from pots, clocks and fans, to radios, sewing machines and bangos, metal tags engraved with plantation employees’ ID numbers.

The Plantation Museum opened in February 2010 in a 530-square-foot space at the Wharf Cinema Center, due in large part to Andy Kutsunai, former chairman of the foundation’s Community Education Committee and a retired Lahainaluna High School social studies teacher, and Bob Kawaguchi, a former committee member who had been the school’s athletic director. They volunteered to collect and organize hundreds of donated items.

“It took two years for us to get most of the things you see in the museum today,” Kutsunai said. “There was a lot of interest, and people were very generous. They said, ‘Please take whatever you want; we’re just going to throw them away one day, so we’re happy to give them to you.’ Bob had a pick-up truck, and we went to homes all around West Maui to pick up things.”

Mike Jones, the foundation’s exhibit director, created attractive, informative displays of artifacts that share fascinating glimpses of plantation life. Response to the museum was so positive, it expanded to 1,065 square feet in the spring of 2016, underwent an extensive renovation and reopened the following fall. Its facade comprises a door, wall and window from an actual 1930s Lahaina plantation house.

On view from Kutsunai are a washboard, bamboo kendo sword and photos that his father, a professional photographer, took of Lahaina during his career from the 1930s to the 1950s. Kawaguchi contributed sports equipment circa 1950s, including a basketball, bowling ball and pins, a football and football helmet, plus baseballs, bats and mitts.

Evelyn Toba, an octogenarian, grew up in Pioneer Mill’s Wainee Village mauka of town. Before it was demolished in the late 1990s, it held the distinction of being West Maui’s last plantation camp.

In the mid-1970s, when Toba’s parents moved from Wainee Village to a neighborhood the plantation had built for employees, they took many things from their camp cottage with them. Toba donated more than a dozen of those items to the museum, including a kerosene stove.

“It was still in my parents’ kitchen,” she said. “Even after they bought an electric stove, they kept the kerosene one and did some cooking with it. It must be close to 100 years old now.”

Also of note are large panels that spotlight the people who came from faraway lands to work on West Maui plantations: Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Portuguese and Puerto Ricans.

One man donated two trunks that had belonged to his grandparents who emigrated from Japan. “His grandfather came to Maui in 1898, and his grandmother followed as a picture bride two years later,” Kutsunai said.

“When we put the trunks side by side, we noticed his grandfather’s trunk was smaller than his grandmother’s, and we laughed. Even in those days, women needed bigger luggage for their stuff than men.”

Hanging from the ceiling is an 8-foot “tin boat” that a group of young boys made from corrugated metal roofing around 1934. Big enough to hold two of them, it was typical of the humble homemade vessels that kids rode along the Lahaina shoreline when the ocean was calm, using pieces of scrap lumber as paddles.

According to Kutsunai, there’s a story behind every item in the Plantation Museum. “Life in Hawaii revolved around plantations for well over a century,” he said. “Although the museum is small, I’m glad we were able to open it and share a part of that important history. There are hundreds more artifacts in storage — enough to fill three times as much space. We’re hoping one day we can make that happen.”

Cheryl Chee Tsutsumi is a Honolulu-based freelance writer whose travel features for the Star-Advertiser have won several Society of American Travel Writers awards.