Etta Wilcox Sloggett

Born on Kauai, raised at Grove Farm homestead, and educated at Wellesley College, Etta Wilcox Sloggett (1878-1933) was a granddaughter of Abner and Lucy Wilcox – American Protestant missionaries stationed at Waioli, Kauai from 1846 to 1869.

Her parents were Grove Farm ranch manager and sheriff Samuel Whitney Wilcox and Emma Lyman Wilcox.

With with her husband, Grove Farm’s Henry Digby Sloggett, Etta had five children: Richard, Margaret, Anna, Edith and Arthur.

In 1921, Etta and her sisters, Elsie and Mabel Wilcox, restored and refurnished the old Waioli Mission house of their grandparents and the nearby Waioli Church, choosing Hart Wood, a noted architect of Hawaii’s Territorial years of 1898 to 1959, to oversee the extensive restorations.

Ten years later, in 1931, the three Wilcox sisters refurbished the Lyman House in Hilo – the home of their Big Island missionary grandparents David and Sarah Lyman.

Both the Waioli Mission House and Lyman House are open to the public and are listed on the Hawaii Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places.

Back on Kauai, Etta and her husband also donated, in 1925, the five acres in Kapaa upon which All Saints’ Episcopal Church was constructed – the first Anglican Church on Kauai.

That same year, they built a cabin in Kokee for use as a family retreat that Henry Digby’s and Etta’s children donated to the Kauai YWCA after Henry’s death in 1938.

On Nov. 3, 1932, Territorial Governor Lawrence M. Judd appointed Etta Sloggett – who’d been a Grove Farm board member since 1922 – as School Commissioner of Kauai and Mabel Wilcox as a member of the Board of Child Welfare of Kauai.

Etta had served only a year as school commissioner when she suddenly suffered a heart attack and died in December 1933.

Her family was greatly shocked, since she was just 56 years old and had appeared to have been in good health.