LIHU‘E — The Lihue Plantation Mill and adjoining Haleko Road have been nominated by a Kaua‘i County commission for preservation under a nation program.
Kikiaola Land Company’s historic Japanese schoolhouse in Waimea is also under c consideration.
During a meeting Thursday, Kaua‘i County Historic Preservation Review Commission members said they recognized the rarity of both sites and nominate them for placement in the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places” annual program.
The need to preserve the mill is urgent because the leaders of Lihue Plantation Company have declared demolition plans for the mill, Pat Griffin, vice chairperson of the county commission, said in a report to the National Trust.
The owners of the mill are not interested in preserving the mill because federal Environmental Protection Agency officials have voiced concerns about the presence of asbestos within its structures, Griffin wrote.
The report noted the owners don’t seem to have an incentive to create a preservation plan, or to seek buyers with a preservation plan.
“Kaua‘i would lose a significant piece of its history if the mill and the road were lost,” Griffin told The Garden Island.
The National Trust program represents the best way to save the mill and the road at this point, Griffin noted.
Since the inception of the National Trust program in 1988, the listing of sites has become the “most powerful weapon in the fight to save the irreplaceable places that tell America’s story,” National Trust representatives said in documents sent to the Kaua‘i County Planning Department.
National Trust has headquarters in Washington D.C. and branch offices throughout the nation.
The program is intended to heighten public awareness of the threats to historic places in America.
Although listing sites offers no guarantee of financial support from the National Trust, the listing and increased public awareness of sites have frequently generated technical assistance and institutional support in preserving sites, National Trust officials said.
The listing of sites have brought public attention to 140 significant sites across the nation, opening the way for their preservation, National Trust officials said.
In a letter recommending the nomination of the Lihue Mill and Haleko Road to the list, David Helder, chairperson the Kaua‘i commission, said the sites have “affected thousands of lives over the past century and a half.”
“Lihue (town) exists because the mill was situated there (shortly after the establishment of Lihue Plantation Company in 1849),” Griffin said.
The mill was a driving force in the development of the town until Amfac-JMB, deciding sugar operations were no longer profitable, closed the mill in 2000, Griffin said.
The town today is the center of government and business on the island.
Assisted by Mary Requilman, executive director of the Kauai Historical Society, Griffin and Bob Schleck, director of the Grove Farm Museum, noted in the report that six-story factory mill building survived Hurricane ‘Iwa in 1982 and Hurricane ‘Iniki in 1992.
The building’s survival offered proof of the structure’s “soundness,” due in part to good maintenance over the years through the 1960s, Griffin said.
Griffin said the mill was special because three companies used it — Lihue Plantation, Grove Farm Company and Kipu Plantation.
Time, however, has caught up with parts of the mill, Griffin wrote, noting the cooling tower and the electrical plant are deteriorating faster due to the materials that were used to build them — wooden framing and a “flimsier grade of siding,” the report noted.
The deterioration has accelerated as well, due to the exposed design of the structures.
The structures also are being vandalized by trespassers, the report said. The property also is overgrown with weeds and trees.
The abandoned mill is in grave danger of being demolished, and the “historical treasures of the Haleko Road are being lost piece by piece through insensitive public policy, carelessness and lack of awareness about their importance,” Helder wrote in a nomination letter to the National Trust group.
The Isenberg Memorial, Kilipaki Camp, which housed Gilbert Islanders who worked in cane fields for a time, the Lihu‘e Civic Center, the mill, reinforced concrete homes, a cemetery and an old stone wall are among the key historical sites found around the road, Griffin said.
Haleko Road should be preserved because it “provides a cultural landscape and a context for 150 years of sugar’s industrial, cultural and social life in the islands,” Griffin wrote.
The greatest threat to the road and the Isenberg lava rock monument, which is maintained, is the “county’s carelessness” with roadside improvements, maintenance and the absence of sensitive traffic planning, Griffin contended.
The two-lane road is scheduled to be expanded into a four-lane road under a state “2020” plan, Griffin said.
But state and county plans allow for the possibility of “feasible alternatives” to widening the road, and those possibilities should be pursued, Griffin advocated.
But Griffin welcomed efforts by Grove Farm Museum employees and Schleck in clearing away jungle growth in areas makai of the road for future educational train tours.
In urging the preservation of the Japanese school, Alan Fayé Jr., vice chairman of the Kikiaola Land Company, Ltd., said the building may be the last restorable structure of its kind in Hawai‘i and in the nation.
Going as far back as the 1930s and more, the school, owned by Kikiaola Land Company, was used by the majority of immigrant Japanese in the towns of Waimea and Kekaha for many years, Fayé wrote.
Japanese cane workers also used the adjacent historic Japanese Buddhist Church, which was located in a mill camp of the Waimea Sugar Mill Company, Fayé said in a report to the National Trust organization.
The church, known as the Waimea Higashi Hongwanji Mission, was rebuilt after Hurricane ‘Iniki in 1992.
The school and church have their links to the migration of 140,000 Japanese contract sugar workers to Hawai‘i between 1885 to 1909, Fayé wrote.
By 1900, up 118 of those first Japanese arrivals to Hawaii became employees or contractors of Waimea Sugar Mill Company, Fayé wrote.
The work ethic of the immigrants, their cultural and social lifestyle have significantly impacted the west side of Kaua‘i, Fayé wrote.
Over time, the prominence of the church and the schoolhouse became central parts of the Japanese community in West Kaua‘i, spurring the construction of similar structures on Kaua‘i and Hawai‘i, Fayé wrote.
The school was constructed by a Japanese designer, architect and builder and his trained carpenters who also built the “Yamase Building” and the “Masuda Building” on Kaua‘i, Fayé said.
The Yamase Building, which is on National Historic Register, and the Masuda Building is on the State Historic Register, are located within a quarter mile of the school.
The school could very well become a candidate for demolition if “there is no timely community and corporate support for restoration,” Fayé said.
The structure is deteriorating quickly, primarily from insect damage, he said.
Staff writer Lester Chang can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 225) and mailto:lchang@pulitzer.net
