It’s been 42 years since the last whistle blew ending work at the Kahuku Plantation Co., though in some respects, life in one neighborhood has gone on as if the sugar mill never closed.

In Kahuku Village V, or KV5, streets are mostly narrow and unpaved. Property lines are largely undefined. And the homes look pretty much like they did when they were built in the first half of the last century.

One other constant at KV5 has been the sense of closeness among the families. The fabric of this rural community of roughly 70 households has been woven tight by the shared bond of working the sugar plantation around which Kahuku was built.

That’s why many of the residents decided to fight the Florida-based developer that bought the village in 2006 with plans to divide it up and sell it.

Continental Pacific LLC is ending decades of low rent that made living in the village attractive for former plantation workers and their descendants. Continental offered to sell homes and lots to residents for $150,000, well below market price, but many declined.

They have been paying $650 a month in rent for years when it’s hard to find a home in Kahuku for less than $2,000.

The low rent is a remnant of the plantation days. It was a paternalistic life where the company provided housing, recreation and other services that supplemented low pay. As a result, ties between the company, the community and its residents were tight.

The Kahuku Plantation was started in 1890 by James B. Castle, who turned the operations over to Alexander & Baldwin Inc. in 1902.

A&B expanded the plantation and provided everything from a school to shops to housing for workers mainly from China, Japan, Portugal and the Philippines.

By the early 1930s, Kahuku had become a "busy little village" with the sugar mill at its hub, nearby clusters of housing and fields of cane stretching 17 miles from Waimea to Kahana Bay, according to the book "The Kahuku Sugar Mill Story," by Barbara Stevens Wilcox.

At that time A&B was farming 4,000 acres at Kahuku Plantation, and there were close to 1,000 homes for roughly 1,200 employees and another 1,000 dependents.

The plantation, according to the book, operated much of the town, including the only hospital between Waialua and Kaneohe, a theater, pool halls, ballfields and a golf course. Even time was controlled by the plantation, which adjusted the day’s wake-up whistle to the rising sun.

"The Kahukuans shared a strong feeling of pride in their home plantation and the town that grew up as a result of it," Wilcox said in the book, published in 1975.

The practice of the company taking care of its workers generally ended when the plantation closed in 1971, but not as it pertained to housing.

Housing at Kahuku Plantation was clustered in camps mostly around the mill but also in outlying areas including Laie and Turtle Bay.

Some camps were organized by ethnic origins with names such as Filipino Camp, Haole Camp and Puerto Rican Camp. Other camps were designated by numbers or other names. The cluster of camps around the mill included Main Camp, New Camp, Ocean View, Highway and one named after a plantation manager, T.G.S. Walker, known as Walkerville.

Over time, many of the homes were demolished as the workforce declined with the scale of operations as the industry faced rising labor costs and foreign competition.

Though A&B considered Kahuku Plantation a "plucky" operation where various experiments and innovations benefited the industry in Hawaii, it was a marginal business because shorter periods of sunshine and land near sea level produced lower sugar yields.

Kahuku Plantation swung between profitable and unprofitable years, and it was a struggle to keep the business going as operations were scaled back, company records show.

In 1941, Kahuku Plantation shed 300 workers. By 1964

there were just 246 employees left and the number of acres farmed was down to about 2,000.

A&B announced in 1968 that it would close the plantation in 1971 and terminate its lease with landowner Campbell Estate 13 years early.

Kahuku Plantation had been the smallest of four Oahu sugar plantations that lasted beyond the 1940s, and became the first to close. Of the other three, Oahu Sugar Co. with its mill in Waipahu had acquired Ewa Plantation Co. in 1970 and ran until 1995. Waialua Sugar Co. closed in 1996.

At the time of Kahuku Plantation’s shutdown, 122 workers remained, down from 225 in 1968. Kahuku’s population had shrunk to 917 residents, some of whom were plantation retirees living in company-owned housing.

Kahuku residents were determined to keep the town alive without its economic engine.

Many services, including police and fire protection previously provided by the plantation and volunteers, were taken over by the city. New jobs were provided by Kuilima Resort (now Turtle Bay Resort), which opened in 1972. The plantation mill was converted to a shopping center and museum designed to bring in tourists, though it later failed.

What to do with the plantation homes presented a dilemma, especially because many former workers were determined to keep living in the community where housing was cheap and neighbors often relied on each other to trade food from the ocean, the mountains and backyard gardens.

"Four generations had worked under the plantation and Kahukuans wanted to remain in the warmth generated by a lifetime of association," Wilcox said in her book.

"Everyone has gotten adapted to a special kind of life in Kahuku," Junior Primacio, a fourth-generation Kahuku Plantation worker, said in a 1968 newspaper interview. "We have a real close community … you can call it one big family."

An agreement was arranged where A&B donated the homes to a resident-managed cooperative, and Campbell Estate leased the land under the homes to the co-op for free until 1983, the original end term on the plantation lease.

The co-op, Kahuku Housing Corp., took over about 250 homes mostly built between 1912 and 1941. Residents started a "tanomoshi," or collective savings, to help with land acquisition and home rehabilitation costs.

Most of the homes were replaced with new homes purchased by village residents with help from the city and a nonprofit development arm of the co-op. About 470 homes, including rentals for seniors, were built.

But about 100 families with emotional ties to their residences chose to remain in their old homes mainly at KV5.

The people who stayed were expecting the co-op affiliate would eventually rebuild or refurbish their homes and then sell them to the occupants. Those plans, however, got hung up because many of the homes were in a flood zone where rebuilding is not allowed.

Over the decades, rent stayed relatively low, rising from an average of $25 in 1968, when the plantation was still operating, to between $68 and $100 in 1988. Before Continental bought KV5, the co-op was charging an average $488 rent. Today Continental charges an average of about $650.

The 72 families now living at KV5 are mostly children and even grandchildren of former plantation workers, with about a half-dozen or so plantation retirees remaining.

Campbell Estate let its lease with the Kahuku co-op continue until 2006 when it sold 172 acres that included KV5, two cemeteries, Kahuku Golf Course and a big field to Continental for more than $10 million.

The developer initially proposed a plan to sell existing homes to KV5 residents for $75,000 and develop 95 new residential lots — a move that most KV5 tenants endorsed, though some felt the plan would destroy their community.

Continental’s development plan ran into permitting trouble, in part over the flood-zone issue, so the company amended its plan to limit the number of lots for sale at about 70 outside the flood zone. But the lot price for KV5 residents rose to $150,000, and while some bought, most turned down the deal.

Continental gave a choice to residents outside the flood zone to buy or get out. The result was a split in the community between those able and willing to buy and those facing eviction.

Robert Cartwright Jr., a fourth-generation KV5 resident, said he’s grateful that Continental came along and is selling lots and homes to residents. "I’m happy," he said. "There’s not going to be another chance to buy."

But Robert Trotter, great-great-grandson of James Campbell and a KV5 tenant who was ousted from the village, said Continental has turned life upside down for many. "What they bought is a living, breathing entity, and they just disrespected the whole system we had there," he said.

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