Kilauea Sugar Plantation started as a cattle ranch in 1863, when Kaua‘i businessman Charles Titcomb (1805-1883), a former yankee watchmaker who’d settled on Kaua‘i after his whaler was shipwrecked in Hawaiian waters, purchased the Kilauea land grant that year from
Kilauea Sugar Plantation started as a cattle ranch in 1863, when Kaua‘i businessman Charles Titcomb (1805-1883), a former yankee watchmaker who’d settled on Kaua‘i after his whaler was shipwrecked in Hawaiian waters, purchased the Kilauea land grant that year from Kamehameha IV.
Titcomb, who’d married Kanikele Kamalenui, had financed his purchase of the land grant from the sale of his 750-acre Hanalei sugar plantation to Robert C. Wyllie earlier in 1863, the lands of which Titcomb had first acquired by lease from Kamehameha III.
In 1877, when Titcomb sold his Kilauea ranch to English Capt. John Ross and Edward Adams for the purpose of growing sugar cane, Kilauea Sugar Plantation was founded, with Titcomb staying on to build the plantation’s first sugar mill.
The mill, with improvements and additions made to it over the succeeding years, was located off today’s Kilauea Rd. in the area between today’s Keneke St. and Oka St., and a village grew around it where there had been none.
One highlight of Kilauea Sugar Plantation history occurred on Kamehameha Day, 1881, when the residents of Kilauea celebrated the official opening of Stone Dam, which blocked the stream bed just below the convergence of Pohakuhono and Haluanani Streams, creating an irrigation reservoir. Hawaiian, British and American flags flew from the mill’s smokestack and the residents of Kilauea marched to the new reservoir, led by the local band.
Another celebration happened Sept. 24, 1881, when Princess Liliuokalani, who had at that time been making a royal visit to Kaua‘i, drove home the first spike for the Kilauea Plantation railroad, Kaua‘i’s first.
L.D. Larsen, manager of Kilauea Plantation from 1919 to 1930, built the stone-walled buildings in Kilauea town and Larsen’s Beach at Moloa‘a is named after him.
Kilauea Plantation closed in 1971.
