Wai‘oli Mission House: Edward's Room

Edward's room, with lauhala mat on the floor, desk and surveying compass to the right. The case in the back right holds the Harper's Magazines.

"This is Edward’s room," says Roger. "Edward was the third son of Abner and Lucy. He built this in the summers of 1859 and 1860. He put the ceiling up, the pantry and the dining room, and this room and more deck and more stairs out in front. He did this when he was 18 years old."

The lauhala mats.

Detail of the lauhala mat.

 

"The lauhala mat was made by a Hawaiian lady that their second George Wilcox had sent to a medical school in O‘ahu on his tab. He paid for everything. The lady came back, he wouldn't take the money so she made this great mat. And it’s really unique, it has a wide-narrow-wide-narrow pattern.

"The original underneath is. It got so old, people tried patching it. We couldn’t let anyone walk on it for a few years until this copy was made. It took the gentleman six months in the living room to do the top one. Now the guests can get the feel of it on their feet without wrecking the real one."

George's surveying compas.

"This a surveying compass or transit, and this is what George used. He bought this for $55 used in San Francisco. The family was indigent, and Abner wouldn’t give George Wilcox $500 to go to Yale to get an engineering degree, so George had to go earn it.

"So he went to Jarvis Island, which is 1500 miles southwest of the Big Island, and harvested guano—bird droppings. He took a boatload of Hawaiians down there. George could add and subtract, so he was the boss. He filled up the boat with guano, and while he was down there he picked shells also.

"He came back to O‘ahu, sold the guano, made his $500 and went to Yale and got his engineering degree in two years. That’s when he came back and used the compass. He was a surveyor for the roads, a collector of the taxes of the Kingdom, and kept the books for a Judge Wiedeman at a plantation in Lihue called Grove Farm.

One of the Harper's Magazines.

"Edward’s books: chemistry, trigonometry, algebra—they brought them all, beyond the three R’s.

"These are Harper’s Magazines. The missionaries couldn’t afford a full subscription so they split it three ways. The mail came into Waimea in those days and they would read it and pass it off to the people in Koloa, they would read it and pass it off to Wai‘oli and here it would stay. It goes all the way up to 1870."

Painting of Hanalei by Josephine Wunderberg King.

"This is a painting of Hanalei in 1860. It was done by Josephine Wunderberg King. She was the daughter of a German coffee planter, R. Crichton Wyllie, that lived down here in Hanalei in what we now call Princeville. And she was experimenting with crushing flowers and using the pigment. with a hala-seed brush.

"When Queen Emma was touring Kaua‘i and stayed with her father overnight, she saw the little girl’s potential, and when Queen Emma got back to O‘ahu, she sent Josephine nice oils and brushes. Josephine was 12 years old.

"This is looking up from Kapaka Road down into Hanalei, the Hanalei River. It’s Princeville—you come down the road, across the little bridge and into Hanalei. There’s a sugar mill. They planted the sugar cane, built the sugar mill, then they found out the sugar cane got root rot in Hanalei because the soil is too sandy. So they had to pick up everything and go to Kilauea. They replaced it with first with rice, and later it went back to taro when rice imports made growing it unprofitable."

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