Coffee is produced in only one state, Hawai‘i, where it is cultivated on Hawai‘i Island, Maui, Moloka‘i, O‘ahu and Kaua‘i.
Its cultivation in the islands dates back to 1813, when Don Francisco de Paula Marin, the Spanish horticulturist, royal physician, interpreter and distiller for King Kamehameha I, first planted coffee trees on O‘ahu.
Twelve years later, English gardener John Wilkinson brought 30 plants from Brazil to O‘ahu and planted them in upper Manoa Valley.
Richard Charlton, the British consul in Honolulu, followed suit not long afterward by importing coffee plants from Manila.
Progeny of Wilkinson’s and Charlton’s trees can still be found in Manoa today.
The decade of the 1820s also saw American missionaries on Hawai‘i Island planting coffee on mission grounds at Hilo and Kona.
On Kaua‘i, coffee got its start in 1835, when William Hooper began farming at Koloa.
After a year’s labor, 5,000 coffee trees, 25 acres of sugar cane, 45 taro patches and 5,000 banana trees were being cultivated by Hooper.
And, in 1842, a pair of planters began growing coffee in Hanalei Valley, and by 1846 the valley was covered with 1,000 acres of coffee trees.
Smaller coffee plantings were also made all around Kaua‘i, and descendants of these plantings still flourish along the Kalalau Trail on Napali Coast.
By the late 1850s, however, commercial coffee production had virtually disappeared on Kaua‘i, with floods, droughts and pests taking their toll.
Hawai‘i Island coffee planters fared better, however.
Records indicate that 3,952 pounds of island-grown coffee were supplied to 80 ships at the port of Hilo in 1854, and production picked up further on Hawai‘i Island during the 1860s through the 1890s, when Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese farmers took up coffee cultivation on small patches in Kona.
Coffee is still produced on many small family farms in Kona.
Today, more than half of all the coffee grown in Hawai‘i comes from the Kaua‘i Coffee Company, a vast estate of 3,400 acres on the Garden Isle near Kalaheo, with its operation being one of the most technologically advanced in the world.
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Hank Soboleski has been a resident of Kauai since the 1960s. Hank’s love of the island and its history has inspired him, in conjunction with The Garden Island Newspaper, to share the island’s history weekly. The collection of these articles can be found here: https://bit.ly/2IfbxL9 and here https://bit.ly/2STw9gi Hank can be reached at hssgms@gmail.com
