Lahaina as Kingdom Capital

Before it burned, Lahaina held more layers of Hawaiian Kingdom history per square mile than almost any other place in the islands. The town had served as the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom under Kamehameha the Second and Kamehameha the Third from eighteen twenty to eighteen forty-five, twenty-five years during which the government of a recognized sovereign nation conducted its affairs on the waterfront of this particular West Maui town.

What that meant in physical terms was a concentration of structures that survived long past the kingdom itself. The Baldwin Home, built in eighteen thirty-five and one of the oldest surviving Western-built structures in Hawaii. Lahainaluna Seminary, established in eighteen thirty-one as the oldest school west of the Mississippi River, where Hawaiian-language literacy was taught and where the first newspaper published west of the Rocky Mountains came off its press. The waterfront where the whaling fleet anchored in its hundreds at the height of the Pacific trade. The courthouse where the provisional government processed its early business after the overthrow.

The Banyan Tree, planted on Front Street in eighteen seventy-three by the sheriff of Maui to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first American Protestant mission in Lahaina, grew across the following one hundred fifty years into the largest banyan tree in the United States, covering about two-thirds of an acre with aerial roots that had become secondary trunks. When the fire of August eighth, twenty twenty-three reached the tree, it burned. The tree survived, scorched, its canopy destroyed. By early twenty twenty-four, new growth was emerging from the trunk. Twelve blocks of the historic district around it did not survive.

What was lost on August eighth was not only structures. It was the specific physical locations where history had happened, the ground on which the kingdom had stood.