Ka Mo’olelo o ka Hale Waiu o Waihe’e, 1919-1970; The History of Waihe’e Dairy, 1919-1970

As the dual tragedies of the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic came to an end, the economic forecast for the Hawaiian Islands seemed very bright, particularly in the agricultural sectors of sugar cane and pineapple. As workers arrived in Hawaiʻi, mainly from Japan and the Philippines, the plantations who hired them were obligated to provide for their needs, particularly housing and groceries.  Although Waiheʻe Sugar Company had been absorbed into Wailuku Sugar Company a number of years earlier, by 1919 the managers at C. Brewer Company, the parent company of Wailuku Sugar, decided that Waiheʻe would be the most suitable location for its Dairy operation.

While the construction of the Dairy buildings began around 1919, several other important steps were taken to transform the land into suitable grazing areas for the dairy cattle. The critical step in this transformation involved dredging a ditch from the dairy building itself (currently the land trust’s base yard), across the wetlands and into the ocean a short distance east of Kealakaʻihonua heiau.  With the wetlands drained, this area became prime grazing area during the summer, while during the hoʻoilo (wet season) cattle were put out to pasture on the dunes.  Of course, the transition from grazing in the drained wetlands to the dunes required paying careful attention to the change in seasons, since cattle are prone to becoming hopelessly stuck in the mud if they were not moved to the upland grazing area at the first sign of heavy rain. In reality, however, much of the dairy operation relied on pineapple silage provided by Maui Land and Pineapple Company. The pits used to store the pineapple silage are still visible to this day. These are horizontal structures dug into the dunes and lined with water worn rocks and set a few feet back from the dune road. In fact, although it is thoroughly rusted, the machine used to cut the silage remains there today, a silent sentinel of a bygone era.

Sometime in the early 1930s, Waiheʻe dairy began distributing beef to the employees of Wailuku Sugar Company as well. After sending Waiheʻe dairy employees to Arkansas to obtain the plans and learn the process of slaughtering, butchering, and processing meat, an abattoir was constructed near the base of the dunes. According to several former dairy employees, typically only a small number of animals were slaughtered each week. In this way, the dairy provided two island staples, beef and milk, with the plantation becoming an even more ubiquitous part of daily life.

Waiheʻe Dairy trucks and drivers ca. 1930s

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the dairy seemed to flourish, with life following a very common pattern, according to the dairy workers. Early in the morning the cattle would be led into the milking barns for their first milking. Once that had been completed, the dairy would be meticulously cleaned and made ready for the next round of milking. With the herd not usually exceeding 100 milking cows, the work was steady but not overwhelming. Although not mentioned by the dairy workers, there must have been a surplus of milk to distribute, as during our work we have recovered bottles from other dairies on Maui. While the dairy workers, who usually numbered about seven or eight individuals, collected, pasteurized and bottled the milk, a team of delivery drivers left early each morning to deliver the Waiheʻe Dairy milk to all of the workers living in the camps between Waikapū and Waiheʻe. Typically, though not exclusively, the dairy workers lived on the dairy property, while the delivery drivers lived in Waiheʻe town.

The Waiheʻe Dairy, in those days, must have seemed like a small town. In the mid- to late- 1930s a number of homes were built, including the dairy manager’s home, which faced the dairy, a home built for the physician of Wailuku Sugar, Dr. Osmer (who had three identical homes, one each in Waikapū, Wailuku and Waiheʻe) by the shoreline, and the beach home for the manager of Wailuku Sugar Company, said to have been designed by the well-known Maui architect, C. W. Dickey. The homes of the dairy workers were located along the base of the dune, a short walk from the milking sheds, while the horse stables, the mechanic shop and the previously-mentioned abattoir were located further along the dune road.     

In 1938 Toshi Ansai, who would later become one of Mauiʻs most famous political leaders, took over as manager of the Waiheʻe Dairy. Many of the dairy workers, years later, remembered Mr. Ansai fondly. Three years into his tenure, however, on December 7, 1941 the seemingly tranquil pace of life at Waiheʻe was disrupted with the attack of the American military facilities on the island of Oʻahu. Within hours of the attack, the commanding general of military forces in Hawaiʻi declared martial law, which required all Hawaiʻi residents to go undergo fingerprinting the issuance of identification documents which were required to be produced upon demand, gas masks, and black-out lights. Restrictions on movement were imposed and, most important for the workers at the dairy, all non-military personnel were required to move away from their homes near the coast. Few of the dairy workers recalled this time fondly, as they were forced to wake up even earlier, walk to the dairy in the dark and work under continuous black-out conditions, which included windows sealed with tar paper, and black-out light bulbs which gave off only a fraction of the light of a regular light bulb. To make matters worse, the dairy workers worried that a jumpy sentry, on-edge from a sleepless night, could easily mistake them for an infiltrator as they walked to work (or, as one dairy worker put it, turn them into ʻnon-dairy Swiss cheese’).

In spite of these disruptions, everyone took the threat of attack very seriously. Twice in December of 1941, on the 15th and 31st, Japanese submarines fired their deck guns at nearby Kahului Harbor. While this artillery barrage was wildly inaccurate (succeeding only in killing six chickens at one of the Kahului camps near the pineapple cannery), it reinforced Hawaiʻi’s vulnerability in this global conflict. With this threat of potential invasion looming on the horizon, the dairy workers formed their own mounted cavalry company. 

Mounted cavalries formed across the island and were made up of local cowboys, mostly from the large ranches, who knew Maui’s terrain very well and were determined to preserve communication between defensive positions if the island was invaded. One photo, taken early in the war, shows the Waihe’e Dairy mounted cavalry in formation in the Kapoho fishpond and prepared for battle. Decades later, several veterans of these mounted cavalry units recalled how serving in them helped to diminish the sense of helplessness they felt. 

Unsurprisingly, the military also took a deep interest in the Waihe’e Dairy, as the nearby sandy beach was the northernmost potential invasion beach, if the Japanese decided to land on the windward coast (recall that Kamehameha the Great’s Peleleu fleet also landed on these same beaches in 1790). As the entire coast of Maui militarized, bunkers were built at various locations. These fortifications were located at several locations along the coast, including on top of Kealakaʻihonua heiau. Additionally, barbed and concertina wire was strung along the coast, and their disintegrating remains are visible today piled behind Kealakaʻihonua Heiau. During the construction of the bunker on Kealakaʻihonua Heiau, Marco Molina, a cowboy at the dairy for many years, pleaded with the bulldozer operator to not destroy the heiau. Although damaged, the operator apparently complied with this request and limited the damage to Kealakaʻihonua Heiau to one section.   

Upon closer examination, evidence of the military presence at Waiheʻe can be found at many sites on the Refuge today. For example, I often find M-1 Carbine casings and M1911 .45 pistol rounds at Kalaehoʻomano, near the river mouth of Waiheʻe stream. The biggest surprise, however, came in May of 2006 when two beach walkers noticed a World War II MK 2 fragmentation hand grenade on the beach at Waiheʻe. After shutting down the beach and clearing everyone off of the property, an Army bomb disposal team flew from Oʻahu and blew it up in place (such situations were once quite common on Maui; in 1980 and again in 1984 a Japanese sea mine washed ashore at Makena and Wailea, respectively with Navy bomb disposal teams detonating them in place). 

In 1943, as the war progressed, Manager Toshi Ansai resigned his position with the dairy in order to enlist in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the all Japanese-American unit made famous for its heroism in Italy and France. Toshi Ansai quickly rose through the ranks, ending the war as a First Sergeant, and earning the bronze star for valor. Toshi Ansai went on to serve Maui in both the Territorial Senate, the State Senate, and as a member of the Maui County Council. 

Soon after the war ended, things seemed to return to their pre-war pattern at Waiheʻe, although the world had changed dramatically in the previous four years. The most notable change included the shift away from the plantation providing all goods and services at the many plantation camps around the island. While the plantations divested themselves of this responsibility to their workers, many plantations allowed their employees to pursue home ownership in Kahului and Wailuku.  This set in motion the conditions that would eventually lead to the closing of the many small dairies that provided goods to the plantation camps. 

In the late 1940s, as these changes began to take shape in the corporate offices in Honolulu, the Waiheʻe Dairy continued to carry on as it had since 1919. However, catastrophe struck in the early morning hours of April 1st, 1946 when an earthquake generated in the Aleutian Islands sent a powerful tsunami which hit all of the Hawaiian Islands. The first wave hit Waiheʻe at 6:30 AM, with wave heights at Kalaehoʻomano (the estuary of Waiheʻe river) exceeding 21 feet and inundated the coast up to 490 yards inland. As one dairy employee recalled years later, the wave rushing ashore made a sound like a freight train, which, fortunately, alerted the workers to the danger of the rushing water. Although four houses were washed away by this tsunami, no lives were lost. However, fatalities elsewhere on Maui included 17 lives lost, with Hilo and Laupāhoehoe on Hawaiʻi Island suffering over 140 deaths. To this day, the stairs of one of the houses remains visible along the beach about 100 yards past Niua (round table). 

The Laʻi family also lost their home in this tsunami. As the family recalled in 2007, as we cleared the brush back from the site of their home, the house had been built around 1906 or so, and, at the insistence of their grandmother and Waiheʻe historian Hannah Laʻi, included a rock-lined cistern used to store the fishing nets. Apparently, Ms. Laʻi had grown tired of having to use the nets as bedding, and made this request as a plea for comfort. 

Although this house had sat vacant and unused during the period of martial law, by 1945 and early 1946 they had begun the process of repairing their home. When the tsunami hit it wiped out everything but the cistern, effectively erasing this connection to this land that the Laʻi family had nurtured for many generations. When brothers Keoki and Milton Laʻi passed away in 2007 and 2009 respectively we made a trip to the family home at Waiʻaukuʻu in Waiheʻe Valley to gather two young hala trees. With members of the Laʻi family in attendance we planted these hala in their memory at their former home site at Kapoho. These hala continue to thrive today. 

This would not be the last tsunami to hit Waiheʻe, however. Another tsunami hit the coast of Waiheʻe, this time from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula on November 4th, 1952. While this tsunami was not nearly as powerful as the April 1st, 1946 event, it uprooted a hau grove near the coast, and dragged it 530 yards to the north west. Fortunately, in part because of the tsunami warning system in place since the aftermath of the  April 1st, 1946 tsunami, no lives were lost. However, an account of this event shared by Ms. D. Laird, an elementary school-age resident of the dairy, captures the fear of this event well:

 “On Tuesday, November 4, 1952… my parents learned a large earthquake [from] the Kamchatka Peninsula was coming our way.  Later in the day [as] we were watching the ocean…the water began to recede out of the bay, exposing the reef.  I remember it making sort of a gurgling sound. All was quiet without the waves lapping on the shore until we heard [my father’s] car racing down our road at a great speed. He screeched to a stop [in] the yard, leapt out of his car and yelled, ‘Get into the car, now.’ [He] sped through the dairy up to the fence at the bottom of the sand hills. We climbed out of the car, and we ran, slipping and sliding in the sand, up the hill. Finally, we stopped, turned, looked and there came a wall of terrifying, fast-moving water. It roared as it hit the bank in front of our house, the splash…could be seen over the roof. Then water started to boil inland, much like a stopped-up toilet, getting closer and closer to the foundation of our home. Luckily, the house was on enough of a rise because just before it reached the foundation, the water drained downhill into the dairy. It flooded the dairy itself and all the pastures and right up to the edge of the road where our car was parked. The dairymen had evacuated the cattle and mules of the fields, save one stubborn mule. We watched the water come in and then suck back out and with it went that one poor mule. There was also [a] fishing shack on the beach… It too was whisked away by the powerful water. Waves must have come and gone several times. I don’t really remember…how long we were on the hill, but this experience terrified all of us enough so that no one in my family has ever wanted to live anywhere near the ocean again.” 

Only five years later, on March 9th 1957, an earthquake from the Aleutian Islands generated a third tsunami that hit Waiheʻe. While the waves that hit Waiheʻe were over 15-feet high, no damage was recorded along the coast. The last sizable tsunami of the 20th century hit Waiheʻe on May 22nd, 1960 from an earthquake generated off of the coast of Valdivia, Chile. This event witnessed waves over 12 feet at Waiheʻe, although, fortunately, no lives were lost on Maui.

Waiheʻe Dairy baseball team ca. 1950s

In spite of these events, the Waiheʻe Dairy seemed to endure, and the small town of Waiheʻe thrived, with a community store located at the center of town, a poi factory, two churches, and, since the previous century, an elementary school. In the early-1960s Richard ʻPabloʻ Caldito came to serve as the manager of the dairy.  Mr. Caldito later served as a member of the Maui County Council, and claims the distinction of being the first Filipino-American elected to office in the United States. By the mid-1960s the economic changes on Maui brought rumors of the end of the dairy, particularly as Wailuku Sugar employees moved out of the plantation camps that the dairy supplied. By this time, the end of the dairy seemed inevitable. By the late 1960s the dairy workers were given the opportunity to purchase their homes and to move them into the growing town of Waiheʻe. At least three people accepted this offer, and at least two of these homes are still standing in Waiheʻe today. 

Finally, the Waiheʻe Dairy closed for good on the 21st of August, 1970, marking the end of a 51-year chapter in the life of Waiheʻe.  The closure of the dairy was overseen by Harold Shimoda as manager. Mr. Shimoda had worked at the dairy since he was a teenager in the 1930s, and his love for the dairy, and dairy work, was palpably evident in a 2006 discussion with him and his family at the old dairy site.

With the exception of some, apparently very raucous parties people still talk about today (the unused buildings were available for party rentals), the former dairy site remained mostly unused for several years. However, controversy would come to Waiheʻe once again in the early 1980s when the U.S. government proposed the site of the dairy as a resettlement location for the residents of the Marshall Islands displaced from the islands of Bikini, Eniwetok and Rongelap. These ʻnuclear nomadsʻ had lost their homes due to the extensive testing of nuclear weapons on and near their home islands. That, however, is a story for another day.

— Dr. Scott Fisher