Significant finds made at Lahaina's historic sites
Jan. 15—Despite the terrible devastation wrought by the
Lahaina wildfire, there's hope that at least part
of the town's treasured history might literally rise again from the ashes of catastrophe.
That hope comes from the
numerous artifacts that have been recovered from the debris of historic sites such as Hale Aloha, which had
a nearly 170-year history as a school and parish hall and was being used for storage of historic artifacts, and the Wo Hing Chinese Museum, a repository for traditional Chinese objects.
"We're finding dozens of objects that survived," said Kimberly Flook, deputy executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, which serves as steward for 14 historic sites in Lahaina, including Hale Aloha and the Wo Hing Museum. "Native Hawaiian stone artifacts did really, really well. Ceramics did pretty decently. Metal did really well. ... Natural, hard materials, like bone, ivory and shell actually did pretty well."
The recovery of the artifacts, coming so soon after the Aug. 8 fire, is due to a comprehensive update of the foundation's
archive launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. With its sites closed, the foundation began meticulously documenting its collection of historic objects, cataloging each item, photographing it and how it was displayed. In early 2021, after the brunt of the pandemic had passed, the public was invited to join in the project, which since the fire has gone online.
"COVID actually gave us a chance to go back and apply 21st-century best practices to 20th-
century collecting," Flook said. "We knew what everything was made of. We knew what condition it was before the fire. We knew where it was located in the building. ... It actually
allowed us to do surgical artifact
recovery, without having to dig up the whole place all at once. We've been absolutely surprised at how well
it worked."
Among the items recovered is a set
of silverware from the family of the Rev. Dwight Baldwin, which, along with ceramics and other items, was found in Hale Aloha. The site once commemorated Baldwin, who was also a physician and is credited with saving the island from smallpox. His
family residence, known as the Baldwin Home, is another site managed by the foundation.
Ancient Chinese coins also were found in the remains of the Wo Hing Museum. "They're the size of our nickels and pennies. They're tiny," said Flook, a trained archaeologist who has excavated sites in Central America. "We found 24 of the 30 coins, in this massive disaster, exactly where we thought they would be."
But an item that one might think would be easy to find, a heavy cannonball, is still missing. "We suspect it's because it's round and it rolled," she said. "So when its case failed and the second floor fell on it, it rolled somewhere that isn't where we expected it to be. So we have cannonballs that went walkabout."
The search for artifacts began in earnest about three months after the fire. Foundation staff, who missed getting caught in the blaze that day because the electricity was out, used the time to get training and equipment to search the area, which was closed off due to environmental and safety concerns.
They focused first on the Wo Hing Museum because they determined that it was the most likely site to have recoverable objects. "Wo Hing had a lot of jade, and jade has a really good chance of surviving," Flook said. "Jade is also easily portable. So it was an easy thing to just go in, load it up and carry it out ... jade fu dogs, jade bowls, jade statuary, jade funeral belts, things like that."
Some items were fairly easy to find because the museum, a wooden structure, burned away completely and left items on top of the rubble, Flook said.
On the other hand, buildings made of stone and coral partially collapsed, likely trapping items underneath falling walls. Flames from the fire also superheated the structure and probably caused further damage.
"A stone-walled building becomes a chimney, and it gets really, really hot," Flook said. "Something that would survive two blocks away in
a wood building wouldn't survive in a stone building."
Still, searchers were able to find a number of items at Hale Aloha, a stone and coral building used as storage for objects not on display at other foundation sites. "We had a set of dominoes that a sailor had carved. They were ivory," Flook said. "They were warped and discolored, but that was one of the little miracles that we could not believe."
Other stone buildings, such as the Baldwin Home and the Old Courthouse, are still too unstable to search, Flook said, but the outlook for recovering items there is mixed. The Baldwin Home housed wooden furniture and other home furnishings, including a vintage square piano from the Castle &Cooke estate. It's unlikely that they survived, but Flook said Baldwin's son had developed an interest in Hawaiian land snails and had a collection of their shells. "We'll have to get lucky, like with the coins at Wo Hing," to find them, she said.
She expressed concern that many of the items in
the Old Courthouse, which exhibited items from pre-
contact to early tourism in Hawaii, may have been lost completely due to the extremely hot flames, which melted the building's steel elevator shaft. "Unfortunately, all of the really good stuff was on the third floor, and it fell two floors," she said. "It's going to be a really major dig when the time comes."
The search is ongoing, as visits to each site are limited by factors such as weather, safety and permission from local and federal government entities.
When and if reconstruction of the sites occurs — so far, all of them have been greenlighted for reconstruction, Flook said, except for the Wo Hing Museum, which will have its fate decided by its owners, the private Wo Hing Society — the foundation will have complete plans, stored in digital form, of the structures as a guide.
"It's not going to be Disneyland," Flook said, referring to concerns that reconstruction will result in an overly romanticized version of Lahaina's history. "The authenticity has not been hurt, and I think that's the biggest hope for rebuilding."
Remnants of the foundation's stone and coral buildings, such as Baldwin Home and the Old Courthouse, are still standing, though wood furnishings such as floors, windows and doors are gone, Flook said. Just last week a project got underway at the Baldwin Home to replace the burned wooden beams that frame the window and door openings. Called lintels, the beams were the main structural support for the walls.
"If we don't do something, one good windstorm or major rain could cause those walls to collapse," Flook said.
For Kalapana Kollars, cultural programs director at the foundation, returning to Lahaina after the fire was "a disorientation like none I've ever felt before," with familiar landmarks reduced to mere shadows or piles of rubble. For that reason he is not that worried about looters.
"This is a place that I know better than the back of my hand, like the back of my eyelid," said Kollars, who had lived in Lahaina for 23 years before moving to Wailuku a few years ago.
He recalled the initial search of the Wo Hing Museum as somewhat haphazard, since they didn't know how much time they would have at the site and where things might have fallen during the fire, even with the updated records as a guide. "You were in the right place, but it's just layered so weird," he said. "In that time, efficiency meant 'Just grab what you see.'"
He estimates he's spent about 20 to 30 hours searching the museum ruins so far, describing the work itself as arduous and slow-going. Searchers are sifting through the ash with one-eighth-inch screens looking for artifacts.
"You're fully suited. You're basically like an astronaut working in the sun," he said, describing the multilayered hazmat attire they wore to search the remains. "When you're done putting on your suit, you're ready to take a break. The rule of thumb generally, they say, is 20 minutes in, 20 minutes out. But we tried to push it as much as we can."
Kollars had one personal mission in his search: trying to find his grandfather's tools at Hale Aloha. His grandfather repaired musical instruments for a living, and the family had donated his ruler and his magnifying glass to the foundation's collection.
"I was holding out hope for his metal ruler, but it wasn't there," he said, saying it was "almost guaranteed" that it melted. "If something survived, it was really dependent on what the environment was when the fire was happening. If it was a place that had a lot of fuel and kept going, it would have been super hot, because the wind was blasting that day."
He also hopes to find a koi, or traditional Hawaiian adze used for carving everything from wood implements to canoes, saying such a find would have important spiritual significance to the Native Hawaiian people.
"If we are to celebrate the people that became known as Polynesians and Hawaiians," he said, "what got them here was their spaceship, and what made their spaceship was that tool. It was really the tool that (created) such a vibrant and expanding society. If anything can be emblematic of that, or even the capability of rebuilding or restarting, it is through the tool that survived the test of time and the elements, and hopefully, this time, withstood the fire."
