Kailua Urban Design Task Force

Current Town Projects
Neighborhood Study
Kailua Town Development

With the division of land during the Great Mahele in 1848, most of the land in Kailua ahupua’a went to royalty and ali’i, though fifteen Kuleana land titles were given to families who applied for them. Perhaps because of this, by the 1850’s the population the area appears to have declined to around 500 residents (Coulter, 1931). Banana, coffee, sugar cane and dairy farms became the primary subsistence activities in the Maunawili area. Cattle grazing continued to be important through the 1950’s.

Hawai’i began importing workers from overseas in the mid-1800’s. The decline of whaling in the 1860’s led to the rise in importance of plantation-style production of sugar and pineapple. In 1852 the first Chinese contract workers arrived to work on these plantations, followed by the large-scale importation of Japanese workers in 1867. These populations began to work the land in Kailua ahupua’a, replacing land once used for taro cultivation with rice farming. In the early 1900’s, Kailua’s population was composed of Hawaiian fishermen, Chinese rice farmers, and Japanese taro farmers (Mustapha, 1985:8).