In 1863, the Rev. Rufus Anderson of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions visited the Hawaiian Islands in the company of his wife, Eliza, and his daughter, Mary Anderson.
Two years later, Mary Anderson recounted her family’s Hawaiian sojourn in “Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California,” which includes a narrative of their nine-day excursion on Kaua‘i.
At Honolulu on Monday, May 11, the Andersons boarded the steam-schooner “Annie Laurie” bound for Kaua‘i, and at Hanalei Bay the following morning they were greeted by Waioli missionaries Edward Johnson and Abner Wilcox.
Following lunch with Gov. Paul Kanoa, the trio then boarded a rowboat for a tour of Robert Crichton Wyllie’s Princeville Plantation sugar mill, located a short distance downstream from where the Hanalei Bridge would be built in 1912.
Afterwards, they visited Godfrey Wundenberg’s home at Kikiula, situated low on the hillside, a bit east of, and just above, the site of the future bridge.
On Thursday, the Andersons rode horseback to the Kealia residence of rancher and dairy farmer Ernest Krull and stayed overnight.
Krull’s property extended westward from the area where the Spalding Monument would be built in 1930 to the vicinity of the Waipahe‘e Slide.
Friday the 15th saw the Andersons at the Koamalu home of missionary Mary Sophia Hyde Rice, now the site of the old Lihu‘e Plantation manager’s house by Aloha Church, Lihu‘e.
Wailua Falls was their destination on Saturday, followed by a trip to the nearby manor house of Thomas Brown, built on the brink of the high bluff just above the juncture of the North and South forks of the Wailua River.
Later, the Andersons went to Waimea, where they met a Hawaiian man of Kamehameha I’s time named “Old Jona.”
Within Waimea Valley, Mary took notice of the Rev. Rowell’s garden peaches, after which they dined with Duncan McBryde at Brydeswood, located west of Kalaheo and mauka of today’s intersection at Halewili Road and Kaumuali‘i Highway.
They enjoyed tea with Dr. Smith in Koloa on Wednesday, the 20th, and at 7 p.m. they embarked on the “Annie Laurie” for Honolulu.
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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
