Among the hundreds of trees planted in Wailua Valley, Kaua‘i, in the 1800s by German immigrant E. Lindemann is the grove of coconut trees he planted in 1896 on leased land that would later become the property of the Coco
Among the hundreds of trees planted in Wailua Valley, Kaua‘i, in the 1800s by German immigrant E. Lindemann is the grove of coconut trees he planted in 1896 on leased land that would later become the property of the Coco Palms Resort. The grove, still to be seen to this day, was the first coconut grove planted on Kaua‘i .
Lindemann’s intent was to produce copra for profit, so he’d imported a variety of coconut from Samoa to plant that was bigger than the native Hawaiian variety and therefore potentially more profitable.
Some of his trees began to bear nuts after only five years, a testament to his having dug holes as deep as six or seven feet, which he filled with top soil and manure prior to planting. Still, Lindemann’s copra venture proved to be commercially unprofitable.
E. Lindemann had come to Kaua‘i directly from Germany in 1864 to manage the 1,000-acre Wailua Ranch for Hoffschlaeger & Co. and took residence in Thomas Brown’s “Wailua Mansion” — an English-style manor house built with a wooden frame, shipped unassembled from England via China, which was situated on the bluff above the junction of the north and south forks of the Wailua River.
In the late 1870s, King David Kalakaua ordered the mansion disassembled and moved into the valley, intending to rebuild it at Kapahi, but his plans went nowhere and Brown’s mansion decayed and vanished.
Some years afterwards, Lindemann resided in a grass house behind the present coconut grove. It was destroyed by fire.
Lindemann also planted cotton on 10 acres at Konolea, located just beyond the Fern Grotto, another commercial failure. Ever industrious, in 1870 he planted 100 acres of sugarcane mauka of the present coconut grove, after which he raised sheep, cattle and horses in Wailua Valley.
