For 36 years, a museum dedicated to sugar cane farming has operated next to Hawaii’s largest sugar plantation with an umbilical cord kind of connection.

Bottles of sugar sold in the museum gift shop: from the plantation.

The sweet burnt smell of processed cane wafting over museum grounds: from the plantation.

Electricity and water for museum operations: from the plantation.

These ties and others are about to be history along with the plantation, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., which is slated to shut down in December.

To say the impending closure has presented some challenges for the Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum, a nonprofit named after the owner of HC&S, is an understatement.

Yet the museum run by a mostly part-time staff of seven backed by volunteers is not only preparing for life after HC&S but also has found some welcome surprises amid the transition.

“It’s a challenge, but it’s not doomsday,” said Roslyn Lightfoot, the museum’s director. “You just have to be ready and have plans in place. You have to get progressive.”

Bye-bye sugar

Honolulu-based Alexander & Baldwin Inc. announced its decision in January to close HC&S. The museum staff immediately knew that one of their biggest sources of revenue — HC&S sugar sold in the gift shop — was going away.

In the first six months of this year, the museum sold $11,000 worth of sugar, which HC&S gives to the museum for free. “It was pure profit,” Lightfoot said. “We had to create new products because sugar was our main thing.”

So right after the shutdown announcement, the museum began developing new merchandise. About 10 items have been produced since February, including “Plantation Days” T-shirts with an image of the Puunene mill surrounded by names of many bygone Hawaii sugar plantations, iron-on patches featuring Kahului Railroad that was once a backbone for the plantation and a belt buckle with an etching of the mill as it was in the early 1900s.

The museum also has stockpiled a lot of sugar.

Another impending loss for the museum is free electricity and water service.

HC&S, which produces its own power through a hydroelectric plant and burning leftover cane fiber called bagasse, provided power and water to the museum at no cost. Now the museum must get its own county water meter and connect to Maui Electric Co. and pay utility bills.

On occasion, HC&S workers have even helped fix electrical and plumbing problems at the museum. Lightfoot said that after A&B announced its shutdown plan she collected cellphone numbers for HC&S technicians in the hopes they can help when needed in the future even though they won’t be working next door.

“We’re going to lose a lot of that kokua,” she said. “They help us in so many ways.”

New atmosphere

Beyond these tangible items, major elements that give the museum a real sense of place are going to be lost when HC&S ceases production.

The mill building is expected to remain but the two smokestacks could come down, taking away a visual landmark for tourists. And for sure, the usually white exhaust billowing from the metal towers will be gone, as will the rumblings of the mill.

“There will be a silence,” Lightfoot imagined.

Another distinctive change around the museum will involve smell. The mill produces a sweet burnt scent that gives visitors a real sense that they are experiencing part of sugar plantation life.

“Part of the ambiance is the smell,” Lightfoot said.

Nearby fields of cane that stretch for miles also will disappear, though the museum is looking at planting a field on part of what it hopes will be almost 3 more acres of land A&B adds to the museum’s 1.5-acre site under lease.

And of course the bustle of workers (there were 675 before layoffs began earlier this year) will be another change. HC&S employees keep the mill stocked with cane and running 24 hours a day.

“It’s going to be different,” Lightfoot said. “Our hearts go out to all those guys over there. These guys are a part of us. It’s just very, very sad to see it happen.”

Recording history

The roots of HC&S go back to 1870 when Samuel Thomas Alexander and Henry Perrine Baldwin established A&B and planted sugar cane on about 570 acres in Makawao. In subsequent years the company acquired or merged with other sugar plantations, including HC&S. The Maui plantation now covering 36,000 acres became Hawaii’s biggest and sole survivor among more than 100 sugar plantations.

A&B established the sugar museum through a grant in 1980 as a memorial to its founders and to commemorate the incorporation of HC&S almost 100 years earlier in 1882.

The museum site was once part of a now-gone plantation town, and occupies two former plantation supervisor homes built in 1902.

A&B doesn’t own or operate the museum, but regularly donates money and helps guide the nonprofit with a few executives who serve on the museum’s board of directors.

This year, A&B contributed $30,000 to the museum, which has an annual budget of about $365,000 generated primarily from admissions, donations, gifts and grants.

Lightfoot said she doesn’t expect A&B’s support to go away with HC&S. “I feel very confident that they will continue to support us,” she said. “I know A&B really sees the significance of what we do.”

Museum programs supported by A&B and others include public school tours that have been run since 1990 and a Maui plantation camp worker registry.

Besides six rooms of exhibits and old plantation machinery displayed outside, other museum holdings include records of HC&S and Kahului Railroad, old newspaper collections and historical photos that are available to the public and have been used to produce books including “The Three Year Swim Club” and “From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill.”

“People don’t realize what we have,” Lightfoot said.

Robert Osgood, a retired consultant to the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center and co-author of the book about the last sugar mill, said the museum is a valuable resource.

“It’s very useful for the people of Hawaii to realize the importance of the sugar industry and how it shaped life,” he said. “It was about 90 percent of the agriculture in Hawaii for about 100 years.”

Coming together

Many people thought the museum would close when they heard the news about HC&S, according to Lightfoot, who said one result was more people visiting the museum. Yet Lightfoot is also concerned that visitor volume could decline after sugar operations cease. About 35,000 people visit the museum annually.

One other positive offshoot from the HC&S closure plan has been more people wanting to help the museum, which led to the recent formation of a “museum hui” interested in helping produce an oral history project interviewing plantation workers.

Lightfoot also expects to receive some pieces of modern machinery from HC&S, which plans to auction most of its equipment that has value to sugar plantations outside Hawaii. But more equipment for the museum also presents challenges.

Artifacts on museum grounds now include an old trench-digging tractor, an outdoor brick Portuguese oven from the 1920s and an 11-foot-tall mill gear. Yet a couple of pieces — a working steam engine that once ran Kahuku Sugar Mill on Oahu and a restored Kahului Railroad locomotive that hauled sugar and passengers from 1882 to 1929 — can’t be displayed at the museum because secure buildings are needed to house them.

Of course one major undertaking for the museum will be updating its indoor exhibits to tell the story about the end of HC&S.

“We may not be handing out sugar, but we still have a purpose,” Lightfoot said. “From an educational standpoint, we’re going to play more of a role than ever.”