I’ve mentioned the Holt family in a few columns, but I’ve never written about them in detail. Their grand estate at Makaha entertained Hawaiian and European royalty with great luau that went on for days. Parties for families and friends might total 300 guests, servants and staff.

The Holts were part of the Jan. 22, 2016, column I wrote about patriarch Robert William Holt’s business partner, James Robinson, whose famous daughters included Victoria Ward and Mary Foster.

The family came up again when Jeff Wataoka wrote me about growing up on Holt Lane, below School Street in Nuuanu (Aug. 28 and Oct. 2, 2015). It was a low-income tenement when his family of seven lived in a one-bedroom house there. I found the area had once been part of the Holt family estate.

The story began when Robert W. Holt came to Hawaii around 1835 from Boston. He arrived with his brother-in-law, sea captain John Owen Dominis, who would marry Hawaii’s last reigning monarch, Liliuokalani, and build Washington Place.

It was in Honolulu where Holt met two shipwrecked sailors — James Robinson and Robert Lawrence — who had opened a shipbuilding and repair facility at Pakaka Point (now Aloha Tower). Holt joined their firm as a business manager and married Robinson’s stepdaughter, a Hawaiian-Tahitian woman named Wati Robinson. Some family members believe she was a niece of Napoleon Bonaparte. They lived at Pakaka.

Their business thrived, and with his earnings Holt bought the ahupuaa of Paalaa (Wahiawa to Waialua), which he developed as a ranch with sheep, cattle, horses and goats. He then purchased the ahupuaa of Makaha — over 5,000 acres — from Abner Paki, a high-ranking chief and Bernice Pauahi’s father.

When he died in 1862, Holt left an estate in excess of $25 million in today’s dollars, according to Clarice Taylor, who wrote a column in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for 12 years called “Little Tales All About Hawaii.”

RANCHING PIONEERS

Robert Holt’s eldest son, Owen Jones Holt, and his wife, high chiefess Hanakaulani, pioneered ranching at Makaha. Owen built a large two-story house that was capable of hosting a party for 100, and since each person might bring two or three servants, several hundred needed housing.

John Dominis Holt IV wrote about the Makaha estate in his book “Recollections.” Robert W. Holt was his great-great-grandfather.

“Everybody loved the land and the spirits that dwelled there. Nobody considered it his or her own home because it was a place for everybody,” the author said.

The Makaha house, Holt recalled, was about half a mile in from the shore. Tamarind trees shaded the road. The house sat on a rise above a stream and was surrounded by lawns. “A big garden was planted with all kinds of flowers, depending on which grandma was in charge. It was a magnificent house with many large rooms. The entire structure, 120 feet long and about 70 wide, was surrounded by wide verandas.”

The dining room was the largest room in the house: 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. Another space of equal size was divided into a front and back parlor with exquisitely made European and koa furniture.

Twelve bedrooms ran down one side of the house. Over a dozen guest cottages and servants’ houses were scattered around the estate because “everyone brought friends and the immense number of people could not have been housed inside the main house.”

ROYAL AND NOBLE GUESTS

The kitchen’s wood stoves burned all the time. They were detached from the house and connected to a series of immense pantries, which housed enormous sets of dishes and cut-crystal glasses.

Luau, state dinners and balls were held in the ground-floor great room. “European royalty and nobility, and our own Hawaiian royalty were guests at Makaha,” Holt wrote. “When they came, hula went on all night and a luau took place every day.”

Most guests rode horses to Ewa, then were driven the rest of the way in a Tallyho coach drawn by six pairs of horses. It held 12 inside and eight servants could ride atop it.

When King Kalakaua’s court went to Makaha to spend a week or two, it was usually by boat from Honolulu to a pier the family built.

A little before 1900, the Oahu Rail & Land Co. train was in operation and made the trip much more comfortable.

John Dominis Holt IV remembered that when he was a child in the 1920s, the family traveled in a Model T Ford. It was a long, bumpy, 45-mile trip.

Owen J. Holt planted taro, tangerine, orange, lime, peach, apple and monkeypod trees. Peacocks, given to King Kamehameha V as a gift from the government of Japan, roamed the property with wild turkeys. A zoo held monkeys and parrots.

Holt built a racetrack at Makaha and bred racehorses and polo ponies. Guests fished, rode horses, danced and sang, Taylor wrote in her column.

When they left the estate, visitors were often covered from head to toe with lei. Other passengers on the train would smell the maile and pikake and ask, “Oh, returning from the Holts’ home?”

RAISING THE CHILDREN

Owen and Hanakaulani Holt had 18 children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Each was given a Hawaiian name and suitable name song, according to Taylor.

Each child had a kahu, who sat beside them at a great table to teach them proper English dining manners.

The children ate before the adults at Makaha. After, they “were brought into the living room, dressed as little ladies and gentlemen, to curtsy to the guests,” Taylor said.

A 24-pound “joint” of roast beef with Yorkshire pudding was often served at Sunday dinners. By Monday, it would be cold sliced beef and by Wednesday, beef stew.

After Owen Holt died in 1891, his third son, James Robinson “Kimo” Holt II, took over the Makaha ranch.

Kimo was tall, with sandy hair and blue eyes. He raised Berkshire hogs and grew alfalfa, millet and sorghum as feed.

Coffee, imported from Guatemala, was grown on 125 acres. Wetland taro took up 150 acres and banana, 75 acres. Tomatoes and watermelon were cultivated.

In 1886, Kimo married the witty, part-Hawaiian Helen Stillman. She was a famous pa‘u rider who rode until she was 96. She added 3 acres of flower beds to the Makaha estate, including 75 varieties of roses, and hired three full-time Portuguese gardeners to tend them with her. Five maids helped her in the house.

Kimo and Helen had 14 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Her children had to share one kahu.

William Perry, a part-Hawaiian from Waialua, was the head cowboy. He oversaw 14 other paniolo, most of whom were part-Hawaiian, Taylor said. Each one was given a house and 10 horses.

Six Portuguese milkers ran the dairy. Each had their own home. Twelve Chinese farmhands cared for the pigs and taro patches while 28 Japanese workers ran the coffee plantation.

Each member of the family had a horse at Makaha, with each child given their own when they had learned to ride.

AWAY FROM MAKAHA

When Kimo Holt died suddenly in 1899, before the age of 40, Helen moved the family to Makiki.

Her mother-in-law, Hanakaulani, built an estate in the area between Fort and School streets and Nuuanu Stream. It consisted of a main house and 15 cottages.

Hanakaulani cared for all her aged servants and their families from the various Holt estates. Several of the cottages were filled with her children’s families.

Taylor said that in 1954 the remains of the old Holt home could still be seen on what became Holt Lane. The area became tenement housing in the 1920s and was demolished in the early 1960s for construction of the H-1 freeway.

Following Kimo Holt’s death, the Makaha ranch began to fail. Some of it was bought by Waianae Sugar Co. and the Oahu Rail & Land Co., and some later by financier Chinn Ho. A place in time had come to an end. “We were the last of a privileged handful of another era,” wrote John Dominis Holt IV.

Today, there are an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 Holt descendants in Hawaii and scattered across the mainland — the eighth and ninth generations since Robert W. Holt came to the isles — under dozens of surnames.

Bob Sigall, author of “The Companies We Keep” series of books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories of Hawaii people, places and companies. Contact him via email at sigall@yahoo.com.