Ira Barnes Dutton … ‘Brother Joseph’

Ira Barnes Dutton was born April 27, 1843 on a family farm in Stowe, Vermont, son of Methodist parents Ezra Dutton and Abigail Barnes.  His family moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, four years later.

In 1861, he enlisted with the 13th Wisconsin Infantry and served in the Union Army during the Civil War as a quartermaster, as well as nursing the wounded and burying the dead.  He was discharged in 1866 as a Captain, but stayed in the South tracing missing soldiers, collecting their remains and settling survivors' claims.

This and a failed marriage led him into alcoholism, and by his own account he spent the next decade in a drunken stupor (“I never injured anyone but myself.”)  When he emerged from the gutter in 1876, wanting to do penance for his "wild years" and "sinful capers," he began to study religion and in 1883 joined the Trappist Monastery at Gethsemane, Kentucky.

It was only after reading about Father Damien that he found his "real vocation;" he sought to help Damien on Molokai.  His motive was not to hide from the world, but "to do some good for my neighbor and at the same time make it my penitentiary in doing penance for my sins and errors." From San Francisco, he sailed for Molokai.  (McNamara)

When he arrived on July 29, 1886, although he never took religious vows, he became known as "Brother Joseph" and "Brother Dutton," "brother to everybody."  (McNamara)

His days were spent as a janitor, cleaning the primitive shelters, scrubbing floors, while also building latrines and outbuildings and bandaging sores, as well as helping Mother Marianne Cope in keeping records and organizing arriving patients. Like Mother Marianne and unlike Father Damien, he never contracted Hansen’s Disease.  (Rutler)

Every day he marveled more and more at what he saw around him, bravery, he often said, greater than in the war he had been through. He enjoyed the playing of the church organist; one day he saw that one of the man's hands was so diseased that all that was left was a stomp which the organist had fastened to a stick and with which he struck the bass notes.  (Burton)

Damien knew how different they were in temperament "but there is love between us," he said. Damien had urged Dutton to become a priest; but Dutton felt unfit. "That requires a high character and great purity," he said and he evidently felt that his early life had disqualified him.   (Burton)

On Molokai, Dutton found real peace and joy. One peer recalled: "Dutton had a divine temper; nothing could ruffle it." At 83, Joseph wrote: "I am ashamed to think that I am inclined to be jolly. Often think we don't know that our Lord ever laughed, and here my laugh is ready to burst out any minute."  (McNamara)

He never left Molokai; he never wanted to. "Seek a vacation?" he asked. "Anything else would be slavery ... The people here like me, I think, and I am sure I like them." He added: "I would not leave my lepers for all the money the world might have."

The one exception was in 1917, when the 74-year-old patriot tried "to buckle on my sword-belt again" and re-enlist. His application was rejected, but he wasn't heart-broken.  (McNamara)

Brother Joseph taught the children the games he had played as a child. Molokai became very proud of its baseball teams, coached and uniformed by Brother Joseph himself.

The one thing that had troubled Father Damien was what would happen to his children when he died. Now he could smile and say, "I can die now.  Brother Joseph will take care of my orphans.”  (Burton)  (Damien came to Kalawao in 1873, he died in 1889. Brother Joseph worked with Damien for three years; he continued to serve the patients there for several more decades.)

In 1908, while the fleet of the US Navy toured the Pacific, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the ships to sail with flying colors as they passed the leper colony of Molokai in order to acknowledge the years of selfless service given by Brother Joseph. Despite such an honor, Brother Joseph’s desire was to work and pray in obscurity.  (Heisey)

Still, more honors came.  A bill in the Hawaiʻi Territorial legislature proposed to give Brother Joseph a $50 monthly pension for his “inspiring services;” the bill was tabled at his request and he said he “was in good health and wanted no reward for his work among the lepers.”  (Arkansas Catholic, July 19, 1919)  In 1929 Pope Pius XI sent his apostolic blessing.  (Heisey)

On the eve of his 86th birthday, the 1929 session of the legislature adopted a resolution of appreciation of Brother Joseph Dutton's services that briefly notes, "Resolved, that this House put on record its appreciation of the great and inspiring service and influence for good in the splendid and effective service he has rendered in their behalf during the past 40 years by Brother Joseph Dutton, in his ministration to the afflicted in Kalawao and Kalaupapa, and that the thanks of the House of Representatives be extended to him in this memorial."  (Thrum)

Brother Joseph died on March 26, 1931.  Former president Calvin Coolidge in his daily syndicated newspaper column noted, “Far out in the islands of the Pacific the soul of Brother Joseph Dutton has been released from the limitations of this earth … (T)his man died a saintly world figure.”

“His faith, his works, his self-sacrifice appeal to people because there is always something of the same spirit in them.  Therein lies the moral power of this world.  He realized a vision which we all have. The universal response to the example of his life is another demonstration of what mankind regard as just and true and holy.”

“He showed the power of what is good and the binding force of the common brotherhood of man.”  (Milwaukee Sentinel, March 29, 1931)

A couple interesting side notes relate to Brother Joseph and Stowe, Vermont.  After fleeing Austria in 1938, the von Trapp family (Trapp Family Singers (of Sound of Music fame; refugees from pre-war Austria)) bought a farm in the mountains of Stowe in 1942 and made it their adopted home.

When the town was looking for a site for a new church, Maria von Trapp, the family matriarch, provided support for acquisition of land and building of the Blessed Sacrament Church (they purposefully purchased a portion of the Dutton’s former farm where Brother Joseph was born.)  The first mass was held on March 6, 1949.

The church windows, walls and ceilings were painted and decorated by internationally renowned French artist Andre Girard. Twelve exterior panels depict the life of Damien and Brother Joseph at Kalawao.  The church and its panels were recently restored.

In March 1952, the Trapp Family Singers visited Molokai and sang over Brother Joseph’s grave.  (Yenkavitch)  "Gently, Johannes placed our Mount Mansfield pine wreath at the foot of the cross. Then we began to sing. How often have I felt with deepest gratitude this great glory of our life as a singing family: that, whenever words failed to say what was taking place in our hearts, we could always express it in music."  (Maria von Trapp, The News and Tribune, January 3, 1960)

Recently, a 7-foot marble statue of Brother Joseph, depicting him as a young Civil War Union soldier, was placed at Molokai’s St. Joseph Church in Kamalo (the church Damien built;) a second statue is expected to be installed at Damien Memorial School in Honolulu (it is planned to be placed in back of the school, facing the campus’ running track.)

The image shows Brother Joseph.  In addition, I have added other images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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William (Will) Joseph Arthur Goodhue

“When we pause to consider that here is a studious and altogether competent observer who has had 18 consecutive years of constant and exclusive leprosy practice among 800 to 500 patients, constituting one of the largest segregated colonies in the world, we begin to realize the value of his accumulated experience and his opinions as a leprologist.” (Report of the Governor of Hawaii, To the Secretary of the Interior, 1914)

William (Will) Joseph Arthur Goodhue was born October 4, 1868 in Quebec, Canada and graduated from Rush and Dartmouth Colleges in medicine. He went to Hawaiʻi in 1902 as an intern practicing on Kauaʻi.

He fell in love with Alice Saburo Hayashi, aged sixteen, and she ran off with him to Honolulu where he had been offered a job, and he set up a home with her in Pālama.  A child (William Goodhue George) was born in 1903; William paid child support, but did not marry Alice.

Dr Goodhue and John D McVeigh assumed the positions of Resident Physician and Superintendent of Kalaupapa.  Goodhue was not only a surgeon in the colony, but spent a great deal of time developing new treatments and improving upon old ones; several of his findings were published in medical journals.

In October 1905, Goodhue married Christina “Tina” Meyer, daughter of Henry and Victoria (Bannister) Meyer.  Tina was grand-daughter of Rudolph Wilhelm Meyer, prior Superintendent of the Kalawao settlement (Kalaupapa) (who served with Father Damien and Mother Marianne Cope.)

Will and Tina had three children, all born at Kalaupapa: William Walter Goodhue, John D. Goodhue and Victoria Goodhue. They were later divorced.

Sister Leopoldina of Kalaupapa said of Goodhue, “We had been in the work nearly fifteen years and until Dr. Goodhue came we had never been assisted by a doctor only a very few times, as they were so much in dread of leprosy.”

“Dr. Goodhue, a true American brave and fearless, plunged into the work with strong will and whole heart doing wonderful work, and it became like a different place.”

The noted author, Jack London, visited the colony, and wrote of his friend, “Dr. Goodhue, the pioneer of leprosy surgery, is a hero who should receive every medal that every individual and every country has awarded for courage and life-saving. … I know of no other place … in the world, where the surgical work is being performed that Dr. Goodhue performs daily.”

“I have seen him take a patient, who in any other settlement or lazar house in the world, would from the complication of the disease die horribly in a week, or two weeks or three - I say, I have seen Dr. Goodhue, many times, operate on such a doomed creature, and give it life, not for weeks, not for months, but for years and years.”

But that is not all.  Goodhue used Alice Ball’s treatment of using chaulmoogra oil at Kalaupapa; and out of the five hundred and twelve patients, one hundred and seventy-five have been taking regular treatment.  (London)

(Ball isolated the ethyl ester of chaulmoogra oil (from the tree native to India) which, when injected, proved extremely effective in relieving some of the symptoms of Hansen’s disease.  Although not a full cure, Ball’s discovery was a significant victory in the fight against a disease.)

Click HERE for a prior story on the research by Alice Ball.

Goodhue, speaking to members of the legislature visiting Kalaupapa in 1921, said, “With two years’ chaulmoogra oil treatment, I believe sixty-five per cent of the chronic cases of leprosy on Molokaʻi can be cured.  And within ten years, all cases should be cured, and Kalaupapa be abandoned as a leper settlement.”

Once known as leprosy, the disease was renamed after Dr. Gerharad Armauer Hansen, a Norwegian physician, when he discovered the causative microorganism in 1873, the same year that Father Damien volunteered to serve at Kalaupapa.

Goodhue retired in 1925.  He had contacted Hansen’s disease and left Hawaiʻi for Shanghai, China, to visit his son who was attending college there (he did not wish to be confined to the leper colony where he had worked all those years on Molokaʻi.)

He lived there on his pension and died of a heart attack on March 17, 1941. He had made the request that if he should not recover to bury him there.  (Lots of info here from NPS.)

The image shows Kalawao, Molokaʻi (Kalaupapa in 1922.)  In addition, I have added other images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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Maʻi Pākē

The common Hawaiian name for the disease was Maʻi Pākē, or Chinese sickness.

Its introduction to the Islands was but one of many new diseases; it was called maʻi pākē (Chinese sickness,) maʻi ali‘i (chiefly sickness) and eventually maʻi hoʻokaʻawale ʻohana (disease that separates family.) It is thought that it came to the islands in the early-1800s, but it did not attain levels of great concern until the 1850s and 1860s.  (Inglis)

One of the earliest descriptions of it in Hawaiʻi was written by the Reverend Charles Samuel Stewart, a missionary in the 2nd Company of American Protestant missionaries, who landed at Honolulu in 1823.

An entry in his journal dated May 21, 1823 notes “not to mention the frequent and hideous marks of scourge, which more clearly than any proclaims the curse, of a God of Purity, and which while it annually consigned hundreds of these people to the tomb, converts thousands while, living into walking sepulchres.  The inhabitants generally are subject to many disorders of the skin; the majority are more or less disfigured by eruptions and sores found many are as unsightly as lepers.”  (Schrodt)

The association of the disease with the Chinese people probably had to do either with the fact that an individual or individuals of that race were noted to have the disease or simply that the Chinese were familiar with it because they had often seen it in their own country.  (Greene)

The name "maʻi pākē" may, no doubt, have originated on the interrogation by a native of a Chinaman, "What is this disease?"  The Chinaman would probably answer, "I do not know the Hawaiian word, but there are plenty of people sick with the disease in my country."  ... It was recognized by the few Chinese, then on the islands, and this has given it the name of "Maʻi Pākē" here, and not because it has been introduced here by the Chinese." (Hawaii Board of Health 1886)

From Eastern writings there is good evidence that India, East Asia and China are among its most ancient homes. The earliest reference appears to be rather universally accepted was written in the Chou Dynasty in 6th century B.C.  In the Chinese medical classic entitled Nei Ching there are four passages which may allude to an afflicted patient. If this classic was written by one Huang Ti, it may have been recognized in China over five thousand years ago.  (Schrodt)

Early incidences in the Islands were most often associated with Chinese immigrants to Hawai‘i and thus the name maʻi pākē. Some believed that it came with Chinese plantation workers, but many individuals and groups also arrived from other regions of the world where leprosy was endemic. It could have come from any number of sources such as the Azores, Africa, Malaysia or Scandinavia.  (Inglis)

Further statements from the Board of Health report refute that the disease was started by the Chinese, "if one Chinaman caused such an alarming spread of the disease thirty or forty years ago, there are now, comparatively speaking, so very few cases of leprosy among the seventeen or eighteen thousand Chinamen on these islands."  (Hawaiʻi Board of Health, 1886)

"Again, if the disease had been introduced by the Chinese, and propagated by them ... I should expect to find a much larger proportion of (them) affected with this loathsome malady, and yet we all know that the contrary is the fact. ... It is much more likely that it came to these islands through the mixed crews of whale-ships, which had negroes, black and white Portuguese, and men of other races, coming from countries where leprosy was, and still is, prevalent."  (Hawaiʻi Board of Health, 1886)

It rapidly spread on Oʻahu.  In response, the Legislative Assembly of the Hawaiian Islands passed “An Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy” in 1865, which King Kamehameha V approved. This law provided for setting apart land for an establishment for the isolation and seclusion of leprous persons who were thought capable of spreading the disease.

On June 10, 1865, a suitable location for incurable cases of leprosy came up for discussion.  he peninsula on the northern shore of Moloka’i seemed the most suitable spot for a leprosy settlement.

Its southern side was bounded by a pali - vertical mountain wall of cliffs 1,800 to 2,000 feet high, and its north, west and east sides by the sea and precipitous shores. Landings were possible in only two places, at Kalaupapa on the west side and at Kalawao on the east side of the peninsula, weather permitting.

The first shipment of lepers landed at Kalaupapa January 6, 1866, the beginning of segregation and banishment of lepers to the leper settlement.

Receiving and detention centers were established on Oʻahu.  Kalihi Hospital was the first hospital for leprosy patients in Hawaiʻi opening in 1865. Kapiʻolani Home opened in Kalihi Kai in 1891 adjacent to the Kalihi Hospital and Receiving Station; Kalihi Plague Camp (1900-1912) and Meyers Street, Kalihi Uka (1912-1938.)

Two notable people in Hawaiʻi associated with the treatment of patients with leprosy are Father (now Saint) Damien and Mother (now Saint) Marianne.)

Damien (born as Jozef de Veuster,) arrived in Hawaiʻi on March 9, 1864.  He continued his studies here and Bishop Maigret ordained Father Damien at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace, on May 21, 1864; in 1873, Maigret assigned him to Molokaʻi.  Damien spent the rest of his life in Hawaiʻi; he died April 15, 1889 (aged 49) at Kalaupapa.

In 1877, Sister Marianne was elected Mother General of the Franciscan congregation and given the title “Mother” as was the custom of the time. In 1883, she received a letter from Father Leonor Fouesnel, a missionary in Hawaiʻi, to come to Hawaiʻi to help “procure the salvation of souls and to promote the glory of God.”

Of the 50 religious communities in the US contacted, only Mother Marianne's Order of Sisters agreed to come to Hawaiʻi to care for people with leprosy.  The Sisters arrived in Hawaii on November 8, 1883.

In the summer of 1886, the Sisters took care of Damien when he visited Honolulu during his bout with leprosy.  He asked the Sisters to take over for him when he died.  Mother Marianne led the first contingent of Sister-nurses to Kalaupapa, Molokaʻi, where more than a thousand people with leprosy had been exiled.

A third person in Hawaiʻi, Alice Ball, made notable contributions in the treatment of the disease. In the fall of 1914, she entered the College of Hawaiʻi (later called the University of Hawaiʻi) as a graduate student in chemistry.   The significant contribution Ball made to medicine was a successful injectable treatment for those suffering from Hansen’s disease.

Although not a full cure, Ball’s discovery was an extremely effective in relieving some of the symptoms of Hansen’s disease and was a significant victory in the fight against a disease that has plagued nations for thousands of years.

The discovery was coined, at least for the time being, the “Ball Method.”  During the four years between 1919 and 1923, no patients were sent to Kalaupapa – and, for the first time, some Kalaupapa patients were released.

Once known as leprosy, the disease was renamed after Dr. Gerharad Armauer Hansen, a Norwegian physician, when he discovered the causative microorganism in 1873, the same year that Damien volunteered to serve at Kalaupapa.

During the third quarter of the nineteenth century incidence of the disease occurred in more than 1% of the population in Hawai`i. In 1890 Kalawao’s patient population peaked at around 1,100. By 1900, the number of new patients in the islands began a slow decline, a trend that continued until the 1940s when it was determined that the disease was not spreading in the general population.  (NPS)

About 8,000 people have been exiled there since 1865.  The predominant group of patients were Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian; in addition there were whites, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino and other racial groups that sent to Kalaupapa.  The law remained in effect until 1969, when admissions to Kalaupapa ended.

The image shows a view of Kalaupapa, Kalawao.

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Marianne Cope

“I am hungry for the work. ... I am not afraid of any disease, hence it would be my greatest delight even to minister the abandoned ‘lepers.’”

Farmers Peter and Barbara Koob had five children in Germany and five children in the United States.  On January 23, 1838, their daughter, Barbara Koob (variants: Kob, Kopp and now officially Cope,) was born in the German Grand Duchy of Hess-Darmstadt.   The next year, the family immigrated to the United States to seek opportunity.

The Koob family settled in Utica, New York and became members of St. Joseph Parish, where the children attended the parish school.

In 1848, young Barbara received her First Holy Communion and was confirmed at St. John Parish in Utica when, in accordance with the practice of the time, the bishop of the diocese came to the largest church in the area to administer these two sacraments at the same ceremony.

After her father’s death, Barbara, in August, 1862, entered the Sisters of the Third Order of Saint Francis in Syracuse, NY, and, on November 19, 1862, she was invested at the Church of the Assumption. She soon became known as Sister Marianne.

As a member of the governing boards of her religious community, she participated in the establishment of two of the first hospitals in the central New York area, St. Elizabeth Hospital in Utica (1866) and St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse (1869). These two hospitals were among the first 50 general hospitals in the US.

Sister Marianne began her new career as administrator at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Syracuse, NY in 1870 where she served as head administrator for six of the hospital’s first seven years.

In 1877, Sister Marianne was elected Mother General of the Franciscan congregation and given the title “Mother” as was the custom of the time.

In 1883, she received a letter from Father Leonor Fouesnel, a missionary in Hawaiʻi, to come to Hawaiʻi to help “procure the salvation of souls and to promote the glory of God.”

Of the 50 religious communities in the US contacted, only Mother Marianne's Order of Sisters agreed to come to Hawaiʻi to care for people with Hansen's Disease (known then as leprosy).

The Sisters arrived in Hawaiʻi on November 8, 1883, dedicating themselves to the care of the 200-lepers in Kakaʻako Branch Hospital on Oʻahu.  This hospital was built to accommodate 100-people, but housed more than 200.

The condition at the hospital were deplorable.  Each Sister-nurse learned to wash the wounds, to apply soothing ointment to the wounds, and to bring a sense of order to the lawlessness that prevails when there is abandonment of hope.

In 1884, Mother Marianne Cope and the Sisters of St. Francis came to Maui and with a royal bequest from Queen Kapiʻolani, established Malulani Hospital ("Protection of Heaven") in Wailuku, next to the site of St. Anthony's Church.  Malulani was the first hospital established on Maui.

In 1885, realizing that healthy children of leprous patients were at high risk of contracting the disease, yet had no place to live, she founded Kapiʻolani Home on Oʻahu for healthy female children of leprosy patients.  Because of her work, she was the recipient of the Royal Medal of Kapiʻolani.

In the summer of 1886, the Sisters took care of Father Damien (later Saint Damien) when he visited Honolulu during his bout with leprosy.  He asked the Sisters to take over for him when he died.

Mother Marianne led the first contingent of Sister-nurses to Kalaupapa, Molokaʻi, where more than a thousand people with leprosy had been exiled.  Upon arrival, on November 14, 1888, she opened the CR Bishop Home for homeless women and girls with Hansen's Disease.  To improve the bleak conditions, Mother Marianne grew fruits, vegetables and landscaped the area with trees, thus creating a better environment among the residents.

While at Kalaupapa, Mother Marianne predicted that no Franciscan Sister would ever contract leprosy. Additionally she required her sisters use stringent hand washing and other sanitary procedures.

Upon the death of Saint Damien on April 15, 1889, Mother Marianne agreed to head the Boys Home at Kalawao.  The Board of Health had quickly chosen her as Saint Damien's successor and she was thus enabled to keep her promise to him to look after his boys.

The Boys Home at Kalawao was completely renovated between 1889 - 1895 during her administration.  During the renovation, it was renamed Baldwin Home by the Board of Health in honor of its leading benefactor, HP Baldwin.

The two new Sisters who came to run the Home were accompanied on their boat journey by poet Robert Louis Stevenson, who stayed for a week.  During his stay, he wrote a poem for Mother Marianne and later donated a piano so that “there will always be music.”

Mother Marianne's spirit of self-sacrifice enabled her to live and work with leper patients for 35 years.  Although there was not yet a cure, the Sisters could offer the lepers some semblance of dignity and as pleasant a life as possible.

Mother Marianne died in Kalaupapa on August 9, 1918.  The Sisters of St. Francis continue their work in Kalaupapa with victims of Hansen's Disease.  No sister has ever contracted the disease.

On December 19, 2011, Pope Benedict signed and approved the promulgation of the decree for her sainthood and she was canonized on October 21, 2012.  (Information here is primarily from Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace.)

The image shows Marianne Cope.  In addition, I have added other images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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Meyer Sugar

At the age of twenty-four, Rudolph Wilhelm Meyer emigrated from Germany to Hawaiʻi where he arrived on January 20, 1850.  At the time, Meyer listed his occupation as a surveyor.

His main purpose in leaving Germany was to join the “Gold Rush” to California in 1848, but he was delayed on a stopover in Sidney, Australia, and again in Tahiti, after which he landed at Lāhaina, Maui.

Meyer spoke German, French and English when he arrived in Hawaiʻi, and soon wrote and spoke fluent Hawaiian.

Meyer settled on Molokaʻi.  There, he met the Reverend Harvey Rexford Hitchcock I, who accepted him as a house guest at Kaluaʻaha, Molokaʻi.

While living with Reverend Hitchcock, he met High Chiefess Kalama Waha, who later became his wife.  Sometime later, he moved his family to Honolulu where he worked for Austin and Becker at an office located on Maunakea Street.

The Meyer family later moved back to Molokaʻi and made their permanent residence at Kalaʻe.  They eventually had eleven children, six boys and five girls.

He supported his family, in part, by holding a number of local commissions from the Royal Hawaiian government, but primarily from his diverse agricultural activity.

Ranching began on Moloka‘i in the first half of the 19th-century when Kamehameha V set up a country estate on the island, part of which is now the Moloka‘i Ranch. Rudolph Meyer, one of the first western farmers on Moloka‘i, served as ranch manager for King Kamehameha V.  (DLNR)

He planted at various times coffee,  corn,  wheat,  oats,  taro,  potatoes,  beets,  cassava,  peaches, mangoes,  bananas  and grapes. He was the first on Molokaʻi to grow, produce and mill sugar and coffee commercially and he exported these to Honolulu and California. He also operated a large dairy from which he produced butter.

Meyer started to grow sugar at the time when the 1876 Reciprocity Treaty between the United States and Hawaiʻi removed the tariff on Hawaiian sugar sold in the United States.

Rather than the expansion and innovation that followed the Treaty, Meyer scaled his mill to satisfy the modest 50- ton annual production from his family's 30-acres of sugar cane.

Constructed in the 1870s the RW Meyer Sugar Mill is one of the only sites in Hawaiʻi with sufficient material remains intact to demonstrate, fairly completely, a nineteenth-century process of sugar manufacture.  The equipment included a mule-driven cane crusher, redwood evaporating pans and some copper clarifiers.

In the early-1880s, when the average investment in Hawaiʻi’s fifth-six sugar plantations exceeded $280,000, the Meyer family investment of $10,000 made their mill one of the smallest in Hawaiʻi.

Meyer adopted and followed mill practices more representative of the 1850s and the 1860s than the 1870s and 1880s.  In the 1850s, animals powered the mill equipment; while he stuck with this method into the future, others replaced the animal power with steam and water.

The Meyer Sugar Mill easily accommodated the milling requirements of the family's sugar lands and repaid the investment within a few years; however, during the 1880s the price paid for sugar steadily declined.

The Planters' Monthly reported in July, 1887, that  "Low prices of  sugar still prevail...and many a  man who once thought himself assured of  reasonable wealth through sugar,  now finds that it will not even yield him a  competence...only running the sugar business on a  large  scale can  it be made to  pay."

In 1892, CM Hyde reported that the Meyer Mill stopped producing sugar cane when  "The  low price of the  product for  the  last  few years ... made  it more than unprofitable to  engage  in  sugar manufactured in a  small way. Now the lands are given up to grazing."

Meyer also served as the Superintendent of the isolated Kalawao settlement (Kalaupapa) (serving with Father Damien and Mother Marianne Cope (now, both are Saints)) from 1866 till his death in 1897 (he continued to live with his family at the top of the cliffs, rather than on the Kalaupapa Peninsula.)

He also created one of the first trails used to travel between Kalaupapa Peninsula and the mauka lands.  It was used to transport cattle and supplies down to Kalawao.

RW Meyer Ltd still owns property in the southwest corner of the Kalaupapa National Historical Park near the Kalaupapa Trailhead and maintains a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Park for trail access, maintenance and the planting of native plants.

The Meyer Mill has been restored and is operating as a museum.  Lots of information here is from NPS and rwmeyer-com.  The image shows the RW Meyer Sugar Mill.  In addition, I have added other images in a folder of like name in the Photos section on my Facebook and Google+ pages.

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