Young’s Homestead and Hale of Kaʻōanaʻeha

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

---

When the American missionary Laura Fish Judd landed on Oahu in 1828, she found herself immersed in “a multiethnic, global community in the Pacific.” Sent to Christianize the Hawaiian people, she may have been surprised to find that missionaries were but one foreign group among many vying for economic and religious influence on the islands. She quickly grasped, however, that royal Native Hawaiian women held significant political power.¹

Laura spent her many decades on the islands of Hawai‘i forming diplomatic alliances with royal women despite missionary notions of a woman's place as solely a passive helpmate to her husband. She became close with Queen Kaʻahumanu, the widow of King Kamehameha I, and wrote about her experiences.² Her reprinted memoir is a valuable record from this transformative period. While it cannot capture the voices or perspectives of the Native Hawaiian women she interacted with, her memoir offers clues to how both foreign settlers and Native Hawaiian women made homes and how different ideas of home co-existed among competing cultures.³

In 1829, Laura visited the elderly John Young, a British sailor who had been stranded on Hawai‘i in 1790, and his wife, Kaʻōanaʻeha, a niece of Kamehameha I, in Kawaihae.⁴ Laura recorded her impressions of this visit, one of the few surviving descriptions of the John Young Homestead, which today lies within the boundary of Pu'ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site. Despite being a short passage, it provides a fascinating window into two versions of home within one family with diverse cultural backgrounds and belonging.

A Western-Style House

“He lived in a dirty adobe house, adorned with old rusty muskets, swords, bayonets, and cartridge boxes. He gave us a supper of goat’s meat and fried taro, served on old pewter plates… We were sent up a rickety flight of stairs to sleep. I was afraid…Sleep was out of the question; I was afraid of the wind, which sometimes sweeps down the gorge of the mountain…”⁵

John Young’s Kawaihae residence, made of local basalt and lime mortar plaster, as pictured decades later. Note the bare lava planes, which would have created very windy conditions.

Photo by A.A. Montano, ca. 1882 (Monsarrat Collection). Courtesy Hawai‘i State Archives, Honolulu.

Laura was far from impressed with John Young’s house. She uses words such as “dirty,” “old,” and “rickety” for what was likely the first western-style house on the islands of Hawai‘i. After being stranded on the island, John had become a close political advisor of Kamehameha I and an ali‘i nui (high chief) for some time when Laura met him.⁶ She found his home deficient and even felt “afraid” within its walls, despite being accustomed to Western style accommodations.

Laura’s criticisms also extended to the man himself. She noted elsewhere in the passage that he spoke the native language “imperfectly” and was “heartless enough to laugh” when she asked him to look around the bedroom for any danger.⁷ As a missionary, Laura came to the islands of Hawai‘i with the explicit goal of “civilizing” Native Hawaiians through the adoption of western cultural practices.⁸ She appeared to find John a disappointing model of Christian civilization, as embodied in his less than exemplary western-style home and manners.

A Grass Hut-Style Hale

“…got up at midnight, and went down to the grass house of Mrs. Young, which was neat and comfortable. She is a noble woman. She lives in native style; one of the sons is with the king, and the daughters in the train of the princess.”⁹

This photo of a grass hut-style hale in Kawaihae is often referred to as Queen Emma's birthplace, the granddaughter of Kaʻōanaʻeha.

Photo attributed to W. T. Brigham, 1889. Courtesy Hawai‘i  State Archive, Honolulu.

Laura’s tone shifts notably at the end of the passage. She expresses admiration for Kaʻōanaʻeha’s traditional hale in the grass hut style characterized by lashing, thatching, and native materials. Compared to John’s house, she immediately identifies it as “clean.” She feels more “comfortable” and safer, as it appears she preferred to sleep there. She also mentions Kaʻōanaʻeha’s noble status and the impressive standing of her children. In fact, her granddaughter became Queen Emma who married Kamehameha IV.

Considering that the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions tasked the missionaries with covering the islands with “pleasant dwellings,” meaning western homes, Laura’s observations of Kaʻōanaʻeha’s hale are remarkable.¹⁰ Rather than finding the “native style” wanting, she finds it pleasant. In fact, she actively prefers Kaʻōanaʻeha’s Native Hawaiian home over the western-style home in a moment of distress.

Women’s Autonomy and Power

Laura’s comparison of two versions of home within a single culturally contrasting family, while brief, suggest the powerful role the royal women of Hawai'i wielded in the early nineteenth century. Despite being married to a westerner, Kaʻōanaʻeha maintained her own separate home in a traditional Hawaiian style. Her autonomy likely reflected both the arranged nature of her marriage – she wed John Young at fourteen or fifteen at the behest of Kamehameha I – and the cultural and political power royal women had gained since the 1819 abolishment of the ‘ai kapu (sacred eating) laws.¹¹

Kaʻōanaʻeha’s autonomy also stood out. At a time when many ali‘i (ruling elite) began to embrace western goods and styles, she openly resisted Christian missionization. In fact, when she died in 1850, she was buried on the Iolani Palace grounds in Honolulu without the high ceremony of her rank, likely because of her allegiance to traditional ways.¹²

Laura’s observations about the Young homestead also capture the regard Native Hawaiian women and missionary women could hold for each other despite vastly different backgrounds, lifeways, and goals. Kaʻōanaʻeha provided exceptional hospitality to a foreign woman while Laura admired the traditional home and homemaking skills of a royal Hawaiian woman. Their fleeting meeting suggests that a few decades into sustained contact between Native Hawaiians and foreigners, notions of home, hospitality and belonging extended across cultures and heritage.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation. 

---

¹ Jennifer Thigpen, Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 1-3.

² Thigpen, Island Queens and Mission Wives, 43-44, 66, 72, 75-76.

³ Laura Fish Judd, Honolulu: Sketches of Life, Social, Political, and Religious in the Hawaiian Islands 1828-1861 (New York: Anson D.F. Randolph & Company, 1880).

⁴ Kaʻōanaʻeha was the daughter of Keliʻimaikaʻi, the only full brother of Kamehameha I.

⁵ Judd, Honolulu, 44-45.

⁶ “John Young Homestead,” Pu'ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site, National Park Service.

⁷ Judd, Honolulu, 44-45

⁸ See for example, Instructions of the Prudential Committee of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to the Sandwich Islands Mission (Lahainaluna: Press of the Mission Seminary, 1838).

⁹ Judd, Honolulu, 45.

¹⁰ Instructions of the Prudential Committee, 26.

¹¹ The ‘aikapu laws forbade women and men from eating together and barred women from eating certain foods. See Thigpen, Island Queens and Mission Wives, 48-50. For additional information, see Diane Lee Rhodes, “Chapter V: Changes After the Death of Kamehameha,” A Cultural History of Three Traditional Hawaiian Sites on the West Coast of Hawai'i Island, National Park Service (September 1993).

¹² Charlotte Hansen Terry, “Ka‘oana‘eha,” Pu'ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site, National Park Service.