The oldest wooden house still standing in Hawaiʻi started out in Boston. Its timbers, Maine white pine, were cut and fitted there in 1819, shipped around Cape Horn, and raised in 1821 on a dusty plain outside the village of Honolulu. The house is still there on South King Street, with two coral-block neighbors that went up beside it over the next twenty years. Together they are the Hawaiian Mission Houses, headquarters of the American Protestant mission that landed in 1820, and the place where the Hawaiian language first went onto a printed page. What happened in these rooms shaped the next two centuries of Hawaiʻi, for better and for worse, and we want you to know both halves before you walk through the door.
Related: Kawaiahaʻo Church: The Coral Church of the Aliʻi (1842), ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow That Ended the Hawaiian Kingdom, and Mauna ʻAla: The Royal Mausoleum Where Hawaiʻi’s Kings and Queens Rest (1865).
A Hawaiian in Connecticut Starts It All
The story begins with a boy from Kaʻū. ʻŌpūkahaʻia was born around 1792 and orphaned at about ten, when Kamehameha’s warriors killed his parents in front of him during a rebellion on Hawaiʻi Island. As a teenager he shipped out on an American trading vessel, the Triumph, with another young Hawaiian named Thomas Hopu, and ended up in New Haven, Connecticut.
New England knew him as Henry Obookiah. He learned to read and write, became a Christian, and talked about carrying his new faith home. He never made it. Typhus killed him in Cornwall, Connecticut, on February 17, 1818, at about 26 years old. His memoir was published that same year, and his example inspired the mission that sailed for his islands the following year. In 1993 his remains finally came home, and he rests today at Kahikolu Church near Nāpōʻopoʻo in Kona.
On October 23, 1819, the brig Thaddeus left Boston carrying the Pioneer Company of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston were the ordained ministers. With them came a doctor, two teachers, a printer named Elisha Loomis, a farmer named Daniel Chamberlain, their wives, and the Chamberlains’ five children. Four Hawaiians sailed with them: Thomas Hopu, William Kanui, John Honoliʻi, and George Humehume, son of King Kaumualiʻi of Kauaʻi. Hopu had left Hawaiʻi on the same ship as ʻŌpūkahaʻia. He was the one who got to come back.
Five Months at Sea, and the Kapu Was Already Gone
While the Thaddeus worked its way around Cape Horn, Hawaiʻi was changing by its own hand. Kamehameha I died on May 8, 1819. That fall his son Liholiho, now Kamehameha II, sat down and ate with the women of his court, an act remembered as the ʻai noa (free eating). Kaʻahumanu, Kamehameha’s widow and the kingdom’s first kuhina nui (co-ruler), had pushed for it together with Keōpūolani, the king’s sacred mother, and the high priest Hewahewa backed them. The kapu system that had ordered Hawaiian religion and daily life for centuries was finished. Chiefs who took up arms to restore it were defeated at Kuamoʻo that December.
So when the mission sighted Hawaiʻi Island on March 30, 1820, and sent a boat toward shore with Hopu and Honoliʻi aboard, the news that came back went into nearly every journal on the ship. Hiram Bingham wrote it down plainly: Kamehameha is dead, his son Liholiho is king, the kapu are abolished. Sybil Bingham gave her entry two exclamation points. Hawaiians had made the biggest religious decision of the century on their own, months before a single missionary stepped ashore.
The Thaddeus anchored at Kailua-Kona on April 4, and nothing was guaranteed. Liholiho heard the request, then waited for Kaʻahumanu to return from a fishing trip before talking it over with his chiefs. John Young, his father’s longtime British advisor, and Hewahewa both spoke up for the newcomers. On April 11 the king gave his answer: they could stay one year, on trial, split between Kailua and Oʻahu. The Thurstons stayed in Kona. The Binghams and most of the others sailed on and reached Honolulu on April 19, 1820.
Thatch First, Then a House From Boston
Honolulu in 1820 was a harbor village of grass houses, and grass houses are what the mission got. On Liholiho’s orders, Boki, the governor of Oʻahu, had a row of hale pili (thatched houses) built for them east of the landing, along the road to Waikīkī and near the spring called Kawaiahaʻo.
The frame for a New England house reached Honolulu on Christmas morning 1820 aboard the ship Tartar, and then it waited. Putting up a foreign-style house took the king’s consent, and Liholiho was in no hurry. Some accounts say the sticking point was a house that would stand larger than his own. Permission came in March 1821, work started in April, and by August the first family had moved in.
Ka Hale Lāʻau (the wood house) is a New England house set down in the tropics: two stories over a cellar, about 40 by 24 feet (12 by 7 m), with low ceilings and small windows designed for a much colder place. It was hot and crowded, and for thirty years it was the working center of the mission. The Chamberlains lived here with their five keiki. So did the Binghams, the Loomises, and Dr. Gerrit Judd, the mission physician who later joined the government of Kamehameha III. By the 1840s as many as five families were sharing the house, one room apiece.
The second building went up next door in 1831. Levi Chamberlain, the mission’s business agent, built Ka Hale Kamalani, the Chamberlain House, from coral blocks cut out of the reef at low tide and mortar made by burning more coral. It was his family’s home and the mission’s warehouse at the same time. Supplies for mission stations across the islands were stored here, which explains the doorways you will see on the second floor and attic of the makai side. The third building, a single-story coral room beside the frame house, was added in 1841 as a bedroom annex. Today it is Ka Hale Paʻi (the print house) and holds the printing exhibit, and printing is the reason this corner of Honolulu matters as much as it does.
January 7, 1822: The Hawaiian Language Goes to Press
The mission’s secondhand Ramage press came out on the Thaddeus. On January 7, 1822, in a thatched building at the Honolulu station, Elisha Loomis set up a Hawaiian spelling lesson, and the high chief Keʻeaumoku, governor of Maui, put his hand on the lever and pulled the first sheet. Nothing had ever been printed in Hawaiʻi before that day.
Hawaiian had always been an oral language, carried in chant and genealogy by people trained to hold enormous amounts of knowledge in memory. Getting it onto paper took work from both sides. Hawaiians taught the missionaries their language sound by sound. William Ellis, an English missionary who arrived from Tahiti in 1822 already fluent in a closely related language, was preaching in Hawaiian within weeks, and Tahitian Christians who came with him taught in the household of Keōpūolani. In 1826 the mission settled the alphabet at twelve letters: five vowels and the consonants h, k, l, m, n, p, and w.
Then the aliʻi turned it into a national project. Liholiho had told the missionaries to teach in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and to teach the chiefs first. Kaʻahumanu, by Bingham’s account, learned to sound out the vowels in about ten minutes, announced “Ua loaʻa iaʻu!” (I have got it!), and ordered forty copies of the primer for her household. On June 6, 1825, the boy king Kauikeaouli, Kamehameha III, about eleven years old, told his chiefs and people, “ʻO koʻu aupuni, he aupuni palapala.” Mine shall be a kingdom of learning. Kaʻahumanu was baptized that December on the ground where Kawaiahaʻo Church now stands, and she put the government’s weight behind the palapala (reading and writing) for everyone, commoners included.
The numbers that followed are hard to believe. By the summer of 1825 the press had turned out 16,000 spelling books. By 1830 it had printed about 387,000 copies of 22 different books, more than ten million pages in all. By 1831 the kingdom had roughly 1,100 schools and 52,000 students, about two of every five people in Hawaiʻi. A handful of mission families could never have staffed 1,100 schools. The teachers were Hawaiian, more than a thousand of them by 1829. One study of the period puts adult literacy at 91 percent by 1834, and the museum uses a figure above 90 percent. Either way, Hawaiʻi had become one of the most literate nations on earth.
The complete Bible in Hawaiian was finished in 1839 after seventeen years of translation. In 1834, students at Lahainaluna on Maui printed Ka Lama Hawaiʻi, the first Hawaiian-language newspaper, and dozens more papers followed over the next century. Scholars such as Samuel Kamakau, David Malo, and John Papa ʻĪʻī used the new tool to set down history and genealogy in their own words. The engraving at the top of this post belongs to that story too. It was cut around 1837 by Simon Peter Kalama, a Hawaiian student at Lahainaluna who went on to become a government surveyor and a member of the kingdom’s Privy Council. Much of what anyone knows about old Hawaiʻi today is known because Hawaiians wrote it down themselves.
The Harder Half of the Story
Now the other half. The same mission that helped put Hawaiian into print also came to remake Hawaiian life, and it carried the certainty that its own ways were the right ones. Bingham pressed his influence with the chiefs so hard that foreign merchants resented him and his own board grew uneasy; he left in 1840 and was never reappointed. In 1830 Kaʻahumanu, by then a committed Christian, banned public performances of hula. Under mission influence the kingdom ordered the first Catholic priests out and for years punished Hawaiians who followed them.
All of it happened while Hawaiians were dying. Foreign diseases had been tearing through the islands since 1778, and the population kept falling through the entire mission period.
Then there are the descendants. The ABCFM wound up its Hawaiʻi work in 1863, after twelve companies and about 184 men and women. Amos Starr Cooke, who had run the school for the royal children, bought the frame house in 1851. That same year he and Samuel Castle, who had managed the mission’s finances and storehouse, founded Castle & Cooke, later one of the Big Five companies of territorial Hawaiʻi, built on sugar.
A generation later the family names turn up again. Lorrin A. Thurston, grandson of Asa and Lucy Thurston of the Thaddeus, wrote the 1887 Bayonet Constitution that stripped King Kalākaua of power, then helped lead the Committee of Safety that overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893. Sanford B. Dole, the son of missionaries, became president of the Provisional Government and of the Republic that followed. The mission had been closed for thirty years by then, and the missionaries of 1820 were long dead. Their sons and grandsons were the ones in the room, which is why the word “missionary” still lands hard in Hawaiʻi. In 1896 that Republic made English the language of instruction in every school, public and private, and Hawaiian did not return to public classrooms as a teaching language until 1987.
The story has one more turn. The literacy that came out of this corner of Honolulu became a Hawaiian tool of resistance. When annexation was on the table in 1897, the Kūʻē petitions against it carried 21,269 signatures, name after name written by a people who had been reading and writing for three generations. And in 1993, the centennial year of the overthrow, the United Church of Christ, the denomination the mission’s Hawaiian churches eventually joined, formally apologized to Native Hawaiians for the part some of its leaders and members played in 1893.
From Family Home to Museum
The houses are still standing because the missionaries’ children took them on. They had formed the Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society in 1852, and everyone called it the Cousins’ Society, because their parents had called each other brother and sister. By 1904 insect damage had nearly finished the frame house. In 1907 the Cooke family leased it to the Cousins for a dollar a year and repairs began. The Chamberlain House followed in 1910, the society dates its museum to 1923, and a full restoration of the frame house was completed in 1935. Since 1962 the houses have been a National Historic Landmark, together with Kawaiahaʻo Church next door.
Today the site is called Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives, and its stated mission is to interpret the missionary legacy and promote open dialogue about its impact on the people of Hawaiʻi. The archives hold one of the largest collections of Hawaiian-language printed material in the world, with more than 80,000 items digitized. And since 2021 a hale pili has stood on the grounds again, built under Hawaiian cultural practitioners from descriptions in mission journals, so the kind of house Boki’s builders raised for the newcomers now sits a few steps from the one that came from Boston.
Visiting the Hawaiian Mission Houses
📍 553 South King Street, Honolulu, HI 96813. The houses sit on the makai side of King Street, one block past Kawaiahaʻo Church as you walk away from ʻIolani Palace.
You have probably walked right past this place. Most people see the palace and Kawaiahaʻo Church, then head back to the car without realizing the oldest house in Hawaiʻi is one more block down King Street. Give it the extra hour.
Tours and exhibits run Tuesday through Saturday, so build your downtown day around that. Guided tours of the historic houses leave at 11 a.m., noon, 1 p.m., and 2 p.m., and a docent makes all the difference in rooms this small and this full of stories. Tickets are $20 general admission, $15 for kamaʻāina, seniors 65 and up, and military, $10 for students from age 6 through college with ID, and free for keiki 5 and under. The museum strongly recommends reservations and only takes walk-ins when there is room, so book through the hours and admission page before you drive downtown. Short on time? The Chamberlain House exhibits are self-guided from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. for $10 general, $8 for kamaʻāina, seniors, and military, and $5 for students. Those tickets are sold at the gift shop to walk-ins only. The museum sometimes closes for its own events, so check the site the week you plan to go.
Parking is what trips people up downtown, so decide where you are headed before you leave. The museum’s directions page points to metered street parking on Kawaiahaʻo Street, Mission Lane, and South Street, a pay lot at the corner of South and Queen Streets, and the metered lot at the Frank F. Fasi Municipal Building, which takes credit cards only. Rates and limits change, so read that page for current numbers and bring a card. Coming from Waikīkī without a car is easy enough: TheBus runs from Kūhiō Avenue to the Beretania and Punchbowl stop, and from there it is about a two-block walk.
Two more things before you go. The mission cemetery beside Kawaiahaʻo Church is free to walk through and open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the museum, and the churchyard around it holds Hawaiian burials as well. It is a burial ground first and a historic site second, so keep your voice down and leave any lei or offerings where they lie. Inside the houses, the furniture and papers are the real thing, many of them from the mission years. Please keep your hands off, and ask before you take photos.
Save the print shop for last. A replica of the Ramage press stands inside, and it is worth a quiet minute. Keʻeaumoku’s hand was on a lever just like that one in 1822, and within about a dozen years, by most estimates, the better part of a nation could read. Then walk back up King Street toward the palace, where the next chapters of the story played out.
More from Wanderlustyle
The Annexation of Hawaiʻi and the Road to Statehood (1898 to 1959)
Aliʻiōlani Hale: The Palace That Became a Courthouse (1874)
Washington Place: Queen Liliʻuokalani’s Home for 55 Years (1847)
The Battle of Nuʻuanu: How Kamehameha Took Oʻahu in 1795
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