The house at 2913 Pali Highway arrived in Hawaiʻi in pieces. Its frame was cut and fitted in Boston in 1848, loaded onto a ship, sailed around Cape Horn, and put back together in the cool upper reaches of Nuʻuanu Valley. Nine years later it belonged to a Hawaiian queen, and for the next twenty-eight years it was where she went when she needed to stop being one.
Hānaiakamalama, which almost everyone now calls Queen Emma Summer Palace, is one of only three royal residences still standing from the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, according to the Daughters of Hawaiʻi, who have looked after it since the 1910s. We pass it constantly on the way over the Pali, and for years we did what most drivers do: catch a glimpse of white columns through the trees and keep going. Then we stopped. What sits inside that house is a nearly complete record of one queen’s life, and the story of how the building survived is almost as odd as the story of how it got here.
Related: ʻIolani Palace and the 1893 Overthrow · Kawaiahaʻo Church: The Coral Church of the Aliʻi (1842) · Nuʻuanu Pali Lookout
A Boston Frame, Shipped Around the Horn
Lower Nuʻuanu Valley was prime real estate long before anyone put clapboard on it. Cool air slides down off the Koʻolau, rain moves through most afternoons, and the temperature runs noticeably lower than it does at sea level in the harbor district. Aliʻi kept homes up here for generations, and so did foreign merchants who found downtown Honolulu hot and dusty.
In 1848 a part-Hawaiian merchant named John George Lewis had a single-story frame house raised on this property using a prefabricated frame shipped from Boston around Cape Horn. Historic Hawaiʻi Foundation dates the construction to a window between 1848 and 1850. The result was Greek Revival, the fashion in New England at the time: a shallow hipped roof, a front lānai carried on Doric columns, white clapboard walls, a foundation of lava rock rubble, six rooms off a wide central hall, and floor-length shuttered windows built for cross breezes rather than winter.
Lewis did not keep it long. In 1850 the property sold at auction for $6,000 to Keoni Ana, also known as John Young II. Keoni Ana was the only son of John Young, the English sailor who became a trusted advisor to Kamehameha I and was known in Hawaiʻi as ʻOlohana. Keoni Ana held one of the most powerful offices in the Kingdom, serving as Kuhina Nui, roughly a premier or co-ruler, from June 10, 1845 to January 16, 1855. He is the one who gave the place its Hawaiian name.
What Hānaiakamalama Means
Sources disagree here, and we would rather tell you that than hand you the prettiest version. Hānaiakamalama is most often translated as “the foster child of the moon,” and that is the reading the museum and most guidebooks use. The same word is also the Hawaiian name for the Southern Cross, the constellation Hawaiian navigators sailed by, and it turns up in tradition as the name of a benevolent goddess figure. Pukui and Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary records the constellation sense. Any of those may have been in Keoni Ana’s mind in 1850. What we can say for certain is that the name arrived with him, not with the queen.
Emma Rooke Inherits a Country House
Keoni Ana died on July 18, 1857 at the age of 47. The Nuʻuanu estate went to his niece, Emma. She was twenty-one years old and had been queen for a little over a year.
Emma Kalanikaumakaʻamano Kaleleonālani Naʻea Rooke was born in Honolulu on January 2, 1836. Her father was High Chief George Naʻea and her mother was High Chiefess Fanny Kekelaokalani Young, which made Emma a granddaughter of John Young on her mother’s side. Following the Hawaiian practice of hānai, she was raised by her childless maternal aunt, Chiefess Grace Kamaʻikuʻi Young Rooke, and Grace’s husband, Dr. Thomas C. B. Rooke, an English physician. She grew up in the Rooke house in Honolulu and attended the Royal School beside classmates who would become Bernice Pauahi Bishop, David Kalākaua, and Lydia Liliʻuokalani. When that school closed, her hānai father hired an English governess, Sarah Rhodes von Pfister, and turned her loose in his library.
On June 19, 1856 she married Alexander Liholiho, who had taken the throne the previous year as Kamehameha IV. Her lineage got picked at during the engagement party, one guest arguing that her European blood made her unfit to be a Hawaiian queen. She broke down in tears and the king reportedly went through the roof.
Hānaiakamalama was a country house and it stayed one. Government business happened downtown. This place sat roughly 2.5 miles (4 km) up the valley from the harbor, close enough to reach quickly by carriage and far enough to feel like a different island. Emma was a serious horsewoman, honored in the nineteenth-century mele “Wahine Holo Lio,” the horseback riding lady, and the valley behind the house gave her somewhere to ride.
Prince Albert, and the Year the House Went Quiet
On May 20, 1858 Emma gave birth to a son, Prince Albert Edward Kamehameha. The Kingdom made a great deal of him, celebrating for days at his birth and at every public appearance after. Emma called him Baby. He had a playmate close to his own age in Frederick, the son of Chief Justice Elisha Hunt Allen and his wife Mary. In 1862 Queen Victoria, with whom Emma had been exchanging letters, agreed to stand as the boy’s godmother by proxy and sent an elaborate silver christening cup.
The cup did not arrive in time. Albert fell ill that August and died on August 27, 1862. He was four years old, and he was the couple’s only child.
Emma’s name changed after that. She had been Emalani, royal Emma. Now she was called Kaleleokalani, the flight of the heavenly one. When her husband died the following year the name shifted into its plural form, Kaleleonālani, the flight of the heavenly ones. Kamehameha IV died on November 30, 1863 of chronic asthma at the age of 29, a year after losing his son. Emma was 27, and she had another twenty-two years to live.
The Hospital That Came Out of an Epidemic
The hardest fact behind this house has nothing to do with architecture. In February 1853 an American merchant ship out of San Francisco, the Charles Mallory, carried smallpox into Honolulu Harbor. By May the disease was moving through most districts of town. Medical reports from the period counted somewhere between 6,405 and 11,081 cases and between 2,485 and 5,947 deaths on Oʻahu alone. More than a thousand of the dead were buried in what is now Kakaʻako. Native Hawaiians, with no prior exposure and no immunity, took the worst of it.
Emma had grown up watching her hānai father practice medicine. In 1859 she and Kamehameha IV founded Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu, going door to door themselves to solicit the money, so that Hawaiians could get medical care without paying for it. It runs today as The Queen’s Medical Center. When Emma was in residence in town she visited patients there almost daily.
She kept building. In 1860 she and her husband petitioned the Church of England to help establish an Anglican church in Hawaiʻi. Both were baptized on October 21, 1862 and confirmed that November. Emma raised funds for St. Andrew’s Cathedral, founded St. Andrew’s Priory School for Girls in 1867 so Hawaiian girls could receive the education boys were already getting, and laid the groundwork for a boys’ school first named for Saint Alban and later renamed ʻIolani School in her husband’s honor. Three institutions still operating today trace back to one young widow with a plan.
The Edinburgh Room
From 1865 to 1866 Emma traveled to Europe and the United States for her health and to shore up support for the Anglican mission. She met Queen Victoria for the first time on September 9, 1865 and spent a night at Windsor Castle that November 27. Victoria’s own journal entry from that first meeting describes Emma’s bearing as dignified and notes that both women were dressed in the same widow’s black. Emma also met Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie in France, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who proposed to her and was turned down. On August 14, 1866 President Andrew Johnson and First Lady Eliza McCardle Johnson received her at the White House, which some accounts call the first official visit to the presidential residence by anyone titled queen. Secretary of State William H. Seward gave a state dinner for her four days later.
Three years after she got home, the house itself grew because of a royal visit. Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and a son of Queen Victoria, sailed into Honolulu Harbor on July 21, 1869 in command of HMS Galatea. Honolulu had no grand hotel at the time, so the Duke was put up at Hānaiakamalama. Emma converted a rear lānai into one large reception room for him. It is still called the Edinburgh Room, and it still holds the china Queen Victoria sent her, along with rosewood furniture and a piano.
1874: The Election Emma Lost
King Lunalilo died on February 3, 1874 without publicly proclaiming a successor. Under the constitution the throne then went to a vote of the Legislative Assembly. The day after Lunalilo died, David Kalākaua declared himself a candidate on constitutional grounds. The next day Emma declared herself one, stating in a public proclamation signed “Emma Kaleleonalani” that Lunalilo had told her before his final illness that he wished her to succeed him and had asked her not to decline.
Emma had real support among Native Hawaiians, partly because her late husband was a Kamehameha and partly because she claimed closer descent from Kamehameha I than her opponent did, a genealogy Kalākaua and Liliʻuokalani both publicly disputed in her lifetime. She was pro-British where Kalākaua leaned American. She wanted to slow the Kingdom’s growing dependence on United States industry and give Hawaiians a stronger voice in their own government. The people were with her. The Legislative Assembly, which actually cast the votes, was not. Kalākaua won it 39 to 6.
News of the result set off a large-scale riot at the courthouse where the legislature had met. Thirteen legislators who had backed Kalākaua were injured, and one of them, J. W. Lonoaea, later died of his injuries. American and British troops from warships in Honolulu Harbor came ashore with the Hawaiian government’s permission to put the unrest down, and rioters were arrested.
Emma withdrew from public life. She came to recognize Kalākaua as the rightful king, though she never spoke again to his wife, Queen Kapiʻolani. People called her the Old Queen. Kalākaua kept a seat open for her at royal occasions, which she rarely used.
She suffered the first of several small strokes in 1883 and died on April 25, 1885 at the age of 49. She was laid in state at her house, then Alexander Cartwright and a few friends moved the casket to Kawaiahaʻo Church, arguing the house was too small for the funeral. That decision sat badly with some people, since Kawaiahaʻo is Congregational and Emma had spent decades building the Anglican church in Hawaiʻi. Liliʻuokalani felt the move showed no regard for the sacredness of the place. Bishop Alfred Willis of the Anglican church ended up conducting the service inside the Congregational one using his own ritual. Emma was given a royal procession and interred at Mauna ʻAla, the Royal Mausoleum in Nuʻuanu, beside her husband and her son. The Episcopal Church in the United States now commemorates Emma and Kamehameha IV together on November 28, a day called the Feast of the Holy Sovereigns in Hawaiʻi.
The House That Almost Became a Baseball Field
After Emma died the estate passed to the government, with SAH Archipedia putting the sale in 1890. In 1911 Territorial Governor Walter F. Frear declared the grounds a public park to be maintained by the City and County of Honolulu. Then somebody floated a plan to clear the house and build a baseball field.
The Daughters of Hawaiʻi stepped in. The organization had been founded in 1903 by seven women who were born in Hawaiʻi, who had been citizens of the Hawaiian Kingdom before annexation, and who could already see how much of Hawaiian culture was about to slip away: Emma Smith Dillingham, Anna M. Paris, Anne Alexander Dickey, Sarah Coan Waters, Lucinda Clarke Severance, Ellen Armstrong Weaver, and Cornelia Hall Jones. Their stated purpose was to perpetuate the memory and spirit of old Hawaiʻi, preserve historic facts, and maintain the correct pronunciation of the Hawaiian language.
Accounts differ on exactly when the fight was won. The museum’s own telling puts the demolition threat in 1915, with the Daughters intervening that year. SAH Archipedia says they were granted authority to maintain the house as a museum four years after the 1911 park designation, which lands in the same place. Some accounts date their involvement to 1913. The outcome is clear either way. The Territory handed over the house and grounds on the condition that they be kept as a museum, and the Daughters have held up that end of the bargain for more than a century. Hānaiakamalama became Hawaiʻi’s first historic house museum. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 7, 1972 under reference number 72000420, and it carries a Hawaiʻi register listing as well. The grounds run about 2.16 acres (0.87 hectares), landscaped with native plants.
What Is Inside the House Today
The collection is the reason to go. Nearly everything in these rooms belonged to Emma or to her family.
The entrance hall holds kāhili, the feathered standards that marked the presence of aliʻi, along with the royal coat of arms. The front bedroom, originally the dining room, has a large koa bed, Emma’s sleigh bed, Prince Albert’s cradle, and the little boy’s bathtub. The parlor holds Emma’s baby grand piano, a koa dining table and chairs, three feather capes, and an Imari porcelain jardinière that Emperor Meiji sent to King Kalākaua. A cloak room holds a royal feather cloak. The back bedroom holds Emma’s koa bed and Albert’s koa crib, with a display cabinet nearby showing the prince’s velvet suit.
The center hall is where the story lands hardest. The silver christening vessel Queen Victoria sent for Albert is in there. So is a necklace of tiger claws, a stereopticon that Napoleon III gave Emma during her 1865 visit to France, kapa cloth, and more kāhili. Portraits hang throughout the house: William Charles Lunalilo, John Young II, Julia Alapai, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, Kamehameha III, IV and V, Emma herself, and her son.
Visiting Hānaiakamalama
The museum is at 2913 Pali Highway, Honolulu, HI 96817. Coming from town, the entrance is a right turn just past the Laʻimi intersection, immediately after a bus stop. Easy to overshoot. Parking on site is limited. Phone: (808) 595-3167.
Hours are Wednesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., closed Sunday through Tuesday and on major holidays. First entry is 10 a.m., last entry 2:30 p.m. Guided moʻolelo tours are generally offered Wednesday to Saturday at 11:30 a.m., subject to docent availability and limited space, with reservations required and admission at $20 for all ages. Self-guided visits start at 10 a.m. and run until 30 minutes before closing: $16 for non-resident adults ages 18 to 64, $14 for youth ages 6 to 17, free for keiki 5 and under, and $12 with valid ID for kamaʻāina, seniors 65 and over, and military. Groups larger than ten should call (808) 595-6291 at least a week ahead. The house went up in the nineteenth century, so stairs are part of the deal; call that same number at least 48 hours out if that is a problem and staff will make other arrangements. Book through the Daughters of Hawaiʻi.
Give yourself an hour, longer if you read everything, and you should read everything. The docents here know the moʻolelo cold and they want to talk about it. The gift shop carries locally made goods and Daughters of Hawaiʻi publications, and the grounds are worth sitting in before you head out.
One practical note for anyone building a half-day around it. Mauna ʻAla, where Emma is buried with Albert and Kamehameha IV, is less than a mile (about 1.2 km) back down the valley on Nuʻuanu Avenue. Nuʻuanu Pali, where Kamehameha I broke the Oʻahu forces in 1795, is about 3 miles (5 km) further up the same highway. Doing the mausoleum, the house, and the pali in that order puts the whole nineteenth century in one valley, and it takes a morning.
More from Wanderlustyle
The Battle of Nuʻuanu: How Kamehameha Took Oʻahu in 1795 · Aliʻiōlani Hale and the Kamehameha I Statue · Puʻuloa: The Hawaiian History of Pearl Harbor · Bishop Museum, Honolulu · Getting Around Oʻahu
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