Albert Spencer Wilcox The fourth of eight sons of missionaries Abner and Lucy Wilcox, Albert Spencer Wilcox was born at Hilo in 1844 with a crippling birth defect of the feet that required him to sail to Boston in 1851
Albert Spencer Wilcox
The fourth of eight sons of missionaries Abner and Lucy Wilcox, Albert Spencer Wilcox was born at Hilo in 1844 with a crippling birth defect of the feet that required him to sail to Boston in 1851 with his father for surgery that cured him of his deformity.
Back home and well at last, Wilcox was raised in Hanalei at Wai‘oli Mission and educated at Punahou. By 1863, he was planting sugarcane at Waioli with this brother, George Norton Wilcox.
Yet success eluded him early on. In 1876, he nearly went bankrupt when his small plantation in nearby Waipa Valley failed.
But opportunity came his way in 1877, when a mill at Hanama‘ulu was built and he was able to raise all the cane it required from that year until about 1898, when he retired as a wealthy man.
Wilcox and his wife, Emma Mahelona Wilcox (1851-1931), lived at Kilohana House in Puhi, a big, white house surrounded by lawns. In the mid-1930s, it was torn down and replaced by the mansion standing at Kilohana today, which was their nephew Gaylord Parke Wilcox’s home for many years.
In 1915, the couple donated $25,000 toward the construction of a tuberculosis hospital in Kapa‘a that was built in 1917 and named after Samuel Mahelona, Emma’s son from a previous marriage who’d died of TB in 1912.
Three years after Albert’s death in 1919, Emma Wilcox donated $75,000 for the building of a public library in memory of her husband. The Albert Spencer Wilcox Memorial Building on Rice Street served as the Lihue Library from 1924 until a new library was built on Hardy Street in 1969.
In 1893, Wilcox, Sanford Dole and W. O. Smith, who were also raised on Kaua‘i, participated in the overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani.
