Kauai Sheriff Thomas Marshall

Hidden within a grove of trees at Malumalu, Kauai, on the mauka side of Hulemalu Road, about a quarter mile east of the intersection of Puhi and Hulemalu roads, can be found the solitary grave of Kauai Sheriff Thomas Harris Marshall (1815-1868).

A native of Boston, having arrived in Hawaii in 1850, Thomas Marshall was Kauai’s third sheriff and the brother of James Marshall, who was Kauai’s first sheriff, the first manager of Lihue Plantation and later, a federal brigadier general during the American Civil War.

Well known on Kauai to be overly fond of the bottle, Tom Marshall was also a commissioner of horses and of whiskey, who habitually kept stashes of liquor under kukui trees and in front of stone walls and other such places beside the roads he traveled on about Kauai.

His friends during those days enjoyed sharing their account of how Marshall unintentionally attempted to ascertain the depth of the wet cave at Haena while inebriated on July 2, 1859.

Actually, what happened was that while in the company of Mrs. Wundenberg and other ladies outside of the cave, he’d persisted in entering it alone in a canoe, and after standing up to make a very low bow to Mrs. Wundenberg, he’d lost his balance, disappeared under water and emerged completely sober moments later.

At the time of Marshall’s sudden death at Malumalu, he’d been its owner for four years, residing all the while on the property in a comfortable thatched house.

Incidentally, several hundred Hawaiians were living in the vicinity of Malumalu in thatched houses during the 1850s, when Tom Marshall, Judge and Mrs. E. P. Bond, Mr. and Mrs.William Reynolds, Judge Jacob Hardy — for whom Hardy Street in Lihue is named — and his wife, Elizabeth, and the aforementioned Mr. James Marshall and Mrs. Marshall made their homes there.

Later, in 1890, Dr. Jared Smith and his sister, Juliet, founded the Kauai Industrial School for Hawaiian boys in a three-story building at Malumalu that closed in 1898.