Island History: Princeville Ranch manager Walter Foss Sanborn

Born in Massachusetts and educated at Burdette Business College, Walter Foss Sanborn (1877-1956) had played professional baseball before sailing to Hawai‘i in 1901, where he first found work as a luna for McBryde Sugar Co., Kaua‘i.

Then in 1905, Albert S. Wilcox hired him to manage his Princeville Plantation cattle ranch, which at that time extended eastward from Hanalei Bay to Kalihiwai and provided beef to the Hanalei district and Honolulu.

Its headquarters — which included Sanborn’s home named Mauka House and built in 1845 — was situated on the hillside a short distance east of and just above the site of the present Hanalei Bridge, not erected until 1912.

During Sanborn’s residence at Mauka House, it deteriorated. Sanborn therefore designed and built a new home on Weke Road by Hanalei Bay in 1910 that still stands.

Sanborn managed Princeville Plantation until 1927, after which he grew taro in Hanalei Valley and owned a poi mill located across Weke Road from his Hanalei home — the Sanborn Poi Mill — in operation until the mid-1950s.

In May 1915, after attending a lu‘au at John Coney’s home in Niumalu, Sanborn spoke with visiting writer Jack London, who was staying with the Rev. John Mortimer Lydgate in Lihu‘e.  

They discussed Ko‘olau, a Hawaiian paniolo from Kekaha who’d contracted Hansen’s disease and had fled into Kalalau Valley to prevent his deportation to the leper colony on Molokai — about whom London, six years earlier, had published “Ko‘olau the Leper,” a fictionalized account of the true story of Ko‘olau.

During their talk, Sanborn provided London with confirmation of Ko‘olau’s ultimate fate — the truth of which had long been a matter of speculation — that Ko‘olau’s remains had been discovered by Coney and police officer John I in a grave in Kalalau Valley.

Walter Foss Sanborn and his wife, Lena, had four children: Walter, John, Percy and Helen.