In 1836, an adventurous young man named Herman Widemann (1822-99) from Hanover, Germany, signed on board a whale ship and sailed off for a cruise through the Pacific.
While at sea, he mastered English, and after sailing for several years about the Pacific, he left his seafaring life behind in 1846 to settle on Kaua‘i, where he found employment as a tutor to the children of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Brown, an English family residing at their Wailua Falls Estate.
The Brown’s estate consisted of leased Crown lands totaling about 1,000 acres in the vicinity of Wailua Falls, on which the Browns built a fabulous and legendary English-style house that was situated on the bluff just above the fork in the Wailua River.
By 1849, however, Widemann had left his teaching post at the Brown estate for the promise of riches in the California gold fields — but he found no gold and returned to Kaua‘i.
On Kaua‘i, he took a job at $800 per year as head overseer at Peirce Plantation, the forerunner of Lihu‘e Plantation, with its first fields planted about where the historic County Building stands on Rice Street.
During this time, Widemann married Mary Kaumana of Anahola, who could trace her ancestry through both the Kamehameha and Kaumuali‘i dynasties, and they would have a large family.
Then in 1856, Widemann bought lands in Halehaka and Hule‘ia valleys from James Marshall for $8,000, named his lands Grove Farm, and began planting sugarcane.
A few years later, in 1863, Widemann succeeded Judge Jacob Hardy on the Kaua‘i Circuit Bench.
And, in 1870, he sold Grove Farm’s 400 acres of cane land, 500 acres of pasture and its thatched-roof house to George Norton Wilcox.
King David Kalakaua, appointed him one of the ministers of his cabinet, and during Kalakakua’s reign, Widemann was elected a Noble of the Realm.
Queen Liliuokalani made him her Minister of Finance.
Widemann also sided against Lorrin A. Thurston and other annexationists, who overthrew Liliuokalani in 1893.
Following the unsuccessful counter-revolution of 1895, Liliuokalani retained Widemann as one of her defense attorneys.
