Painted by J. May Fraser in I929 from old photographs KOAMVALU 1865 OF KOAifALU Q-H, Story of RPioneers on and of [fh a t They B uilt in Is/and Garden Kaua i Tha t By Ethel M'' Damon Volume 1 Privately Printed Honolulu 1931 Having worked Itself out Through the Soil of its Native Garden This Story of Koamalu Is now laid at that Garden Gate By One from Without In the Hope that it may bring Something of Beauty or Truth or Both To a Certain Child of that Island And to any other Child born Within the Ocean-cut Circle Of that Enchanted Island Garden. -a -e,, 367 7 P,. ~PREFACE Intended primarily as a permanent setting for many of the family letters and much of the family history, this true story of the island home at Koamalu has come to include not a little from the growth of neighboring communities, together with attendant developments in trade and the tilling of the soil. Almost unconsciously, something in the nature of an epic of the island has thus gradually taken shape. To members of the several families our narrative conveys an affectionate regard, linked with a deep interest in the unfolding of the family trees in all their roots and branches. To the friends, who in many varied ways have furthered the telling of the tale, its completed form carries our most grateful appreciation. To the general reader it is offered with the assurance that a deal of human nature, interwoven with more than a few threads of romance, lies folded away not only between, but also within, the lines of history itself. Ethel JCoseley D)amon ec5ary Dorothea RTce Isenberg Lihue, Kauai, September 3, 1930. Copyright 1931 by Ethel M. Damon PRINTED AT THE HONOLULU STAR-BULLETIN PRESS The Chapters of Volume 1 BOOK I. Hannah Maria Rice 1 By Way of Introduction........................ Pages 3 to 10 2 The New Home........................... 11 to 33 3 Keeping House -......-..................... 34 to 54 4 Letters from the Old Homes.-.............-........ ---. 55 to 81 5 Pilgrims to the Westward............-....... — 82 to 101 6 New Altars ---—............ --- ------ 102 to 147 7 School Days.......-...............-.....- 148 to 174 8 Near Neighbors at Koloa...........-.............175 to 224 BOOK II. Early Settlers on Kauai 9 Waimea, Seat of Kings.....................227 to 306 10 On Around the Island -........-.........-..-307 to 388 11 Nawiliwili Neighborhood......-...................389 to 450 12 The Plantation Home at Koamalu.... --- —----—. — 451 to 493 BOOK I Hannah Maria Rice By Way of Introduction On a green hillslope in Lihue, Kauai, facing the east, there rises a high shaft of marble, exquisite, white, daring in its poise and achievement. Above mourning figures in bronze at its base, through fields of tall Easter lilies, hundreds of eager pilgrims press upward, onward, toward rays of celestial light. Setting her feet on this heavenly pathway, one figure alone looks back to earth, almost calling to those near and dear, yearning for the little son and daughter left so early to thread out the tangles of life. As she looks backward, the mother's face bears the features, fair even in marble, of one who in girlhood and early womanhood lived blithely among the hills of this island garden of Hawaii. Yet this noble memorial in marble stands not alone to Hannah Maria Rice Isenberg. By the loving hands of her son, her daughter, her sister and her son-in-law it was placed here in the garden of the dead not for her only, but to the memory also of her husband, her father, her mother, her sisters, her brother and others of her family. It stands a fitting emblem of the beauty and the holiness, the strength and the endurance of ties which bind together two families coming from the far continents of America and Europe to make their homes on these islands of the broad Pacific. And yet, even with the glory of marble, all has not been said. For during the space of a generation and more the daughter of Hannah Maria Rice Isenberg has treasured up accounts of the sayings and doings of her mother and father, and of the times also of her grandmothers and grandfathers, all well beloved. And it is by the wish of Dora Rice Isenberg that this present memorial is set forth 4 K A M A L U in writing. It is an attempt to supplement with words the earlier record in marble, to tell something of the epic of those lives, of their pilgrimage to a strange land, of their high purpose, of their unswerving loyalty to conviction, of their achievement, of their human frailty, of their love and of their life. Family letters looking back through more than a century of time have yielded up their ivory-toned pages, long unfolded. For many years the Rev. John M. Lydgate gathered local data regarding the history of the island and.the plantation, with the evolution of the Lihue sugar mill. Plantation offices and agents granted access to the data in their records. Hon. G. N. Wilcox, who has been a near neighbor of Lihue Plantation for almost seventy years, gave generously from his store of accurate memories. Various members of the Rice family delved into family papers and read this manuscript with patience and skill. Anne Bachman Hyde of Tennessee opened up her rare collection of letters and stories tracing the Jabez Backus Hyde family into early colonial days among the Seneca Indians of northern New York State. An Isenberg of Germany, Rena Barckhausen, visiting here in the islands, spent patient months transcribing digests of letters loaned by German relatives and friends. Still others of the European connection, Paula Volkmann and her husband, closer by a generation to the main characters in the story, made a summer pilgrimage through many parishes of central Germany gathering pictures of the churches and houses which had seen the life of Daniel and Dorothea Isenberg. And many of the family letters have been translated into English by Dora Rice Isenberg herself, who in both person and personality mingles the elements of the American Protestant Mission and of the THE MONUMENT IN MARBLE BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION 7 German Lutheran thought which go to make up this present story from the short, vivid life of her mother and the long, active career of her father in their influence upon our island community. During the months of a long year Josephine Sullivan of Boston worked among the family letters and among official records in Honolulu, following clues, noting, sorting, filing. This was the last piece of work which she was ever able fully to enter upon, and she was well aware that without experience, enthusiasm and painstaking research such as hers the final assembling of this manuscript would never have been undertaken. Residents of Kauai and other friends have brought out old letters and the sum of their recollections. Archives, histories and contemporary biographies have given of their generous store. Almost as with the epics of old, so also somewhat with this new story, its bringing together has been wrought by so many hands that no single one has achieved its fulfilment. It seems a bit from the tapestry of life that Hawaii weaves within her borders, out of threads and colors that drift to her from distant shores, setting in also her own matchless threads and colors, and throwing back and forth across them all the unerring shuttle of experience, until length and breadth finally begin to reveal something of her own new pattern, now shadowy, now brilliant, woven firmly into the varied texture of a fabric all her own. On Kauai this weaving is done in the brightly colored tapestry of a garden, for justly has Kauai become known as the Garden Island of the Hawaiian group. Yet more is she even than that, for Kauai is truly an island garden set in "a sapphire sea". And our own story grows in a 8 KOAMALU corner of this jewelled setting where seeds have been dropped from many lands and tended by many hands; where the prim borders of northern gardens often run into unexpected riots of laughing, luxuriant growth; where the measured seasonal flowering of borrowed plants sometimes bursts out with lavish flame at odd, uncounted seasons the whole bright year round; where, it is true, as in the vineyards of other husbandmen, tares often spring up unbidden; and yet where the native children of many races have a passionate care for the native trees and flowers, as well as for those transplanted from far-away soil, enfolded as are they all in the embrace of soft, sunny air, green stretch of plain and of mountain forest, gray of mist and pelting rain heralding the sweep of storm, delicate penciling line of shore as it touches the sea, and brilliant blue of sky beyond the great wandering trade-wind clouds of Hawaii nei. For many years there stood in Lihue at the northern edge of the great grove of kukui trees a low, quiet house which sheltered that wondrous thing, a home. It was a house that grew as hearts grow, with new rooms for new friends. It was a wise old house, an experienced and a traveled house. Its quaintly chiselled panels had been shaped by Chinese hands on Chinese soil, in the days of the eighteen-forties when trading vessels of scarce a hundred tons burden plied their unhurried way between the Sandwich Islands and New York via Canton. China seemed, in fact, much closer to Hawaii than did the near-by coast of California with her heritage of gold as yet hoarded within her breast.