Building owners and businesses along Honokaa’s picturesque Mamane Street are hoping road signs and the inclusion of several buildings in the Hawaii Register of Historic Places will give the town an economic boost.
The Heritage Center at University of Hawaii at Hilo’s North Hawaii Education and Research Center and Historic Honokaa Ad Hoc Committee scheduled a free public presentation at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Honokaa People’s Theatre. They will unveil two new signs proclaiming “Historic Honokaa Town” at locations along Mamalahoa Highway and another two along Honokaa-Waipio Road.
Gerald De Mello, a retired UH-Hilo sociologist and administrator who owns the Ferreira Building on Mamane, the town’s main drag, has taken charge of the push for historical designation in the Hamakua Coast village. He said the 4-by-12-foot signs, designed by the state Department of Transportation, will attract visitors and residents to the former sugar town, mainly for day visits.
“Those brown signs are the ones that they use in the other 49 states as historical stops,” De Mello said Tuesday. “Basically, what Honokaa will become, when we put the signage in, is more of a destination, rather than a bypass town. We’ve learned that the second-most-visited site on the island, next to the volcano, is Waipio (Valley). So when we do the signage for Historic Honokaa, what it will do is bring people into the town. That, and Honokaa’s vernacular architecture, should create synergy with businesses to become an economic driver for the town.”
De Mello said Quentin Tomich, a state zoologist who died earlier this year at 93, spearheaded an unsuccessful effort to get Mamane Street into the registry in 1976. Tomich’s son, Peter, a comptroller and information technologist at North Hawaii Community Federal Credit Union, said his father came to Hawaii to work in vector control after earning his Ph.D. at the University of California at Davis at about the time of statehood.
“He fell in love with Honokaa, the town, the area, and got involved with a group of people who organized the Hamakua Humanities Project in the 1970s, and I believe that must be the group who started the first push for the historic registry,” Peter Tomich said.
De Mello said Tomich’s approach relied on getting 51 percent of the merchants in town on board with the idea, which didn’t occur, while De Mello is using a “multiproperty approach.”
“Each individual property owner could opt to say whether they want in or not,” he said. “Right now, we have 14 nominees. Basically, with the registry, the property owners have access to financial status that helps them with property improvement.”
In addition to the sign unveiling, Ross Stephenson, a historian and former keeper of the Hawaii Register of Historic Places, will use the forum to update progress on the registry initiative. Stephenson said the Hawaii Historic Places Review Board should find the 14 nominee buildings possess the required significance in Hawaiian history, architecture and culture for inclusion in the registry.
“Honokaa today is still a place that reflects the territorial period,” he said. “It not only had sugar, it had ranching and homesteading. The architecture and much of the town is what someone would recognize if they’d been walking down the streets in 1920. They look very similar today. You’ve got the same kind of unique single-wall commercial-style buildings, a large collection of them. Many other towns in the state have lost that. Hanapepe (Kauai) had that and they still have some of it, but they got blasted by Hurricane Iniki. Oahu doesn’t have much of that anymore because there’s so much development.”
Momi Naughton, director of NHERC’s Heritage Center, said Honokaa was once the third largest town in the state, behind Honolulu and Hilo. She said its unique look and rich history — much of it unknown by many area residents — would make for excellent walking tours.
“During World War II, for example, Parker Ranch was essentially a dry town because management really didn’t want the cowboys drinking,” Naughton said. “The servicemen would come down here. The trucks would bring them and drop them off. Right by the Ferreira Building, they’d put up a sign that said Long Soup Corner, because the old timers knew it as that. There was a great saimin shop there but the servicemen didn’t know how to say that, so they just called it long soup.”
The town’s history includes the tragic 1889 hanging of Japanese storekeeper Katsu Goto, “the only documented lynching in the history of Hawaii,” she said, plus the colorful story of the Rickard House, which now houses the Salvation Army.
“William H. Rickard was the first plantation manager here but he was also a royalist. He was a Brit. He was in the counter-revolution of 1895 to put (Queen Liliuokalani) back into power after she was overthrown in ’93. He was the one who supplied guns for the counter-revolution,” Naughton said. “And he was arrested for that and sentenced to be hanged. It was commuted to 35 years, and then, when the queen was pardoned, they were all pardoned, (Robert) Wilcox and the rest of them.
“We know that Queen Kapiolani visited Honokaa twice and stayed with the Rickards. We have the invitation to Kalakaua’s coronation to the Rickards. We’ve got the original here at the heritage center.”
Naughton praised the town’s “quaint rural nature” and Mamane Street’s “unique collection of businesses focusing on Hawaii-made items and wonderful restaurants.”
All see the registry as a potential economic stimulus and a way to bolster civic pride in a town largely bypassed by visitors going to Waipio, Waimea and Kailua-Kona in the two decades since Hamakua Sugar closed.
“Here you have this really beautiful town with the kind of environment our grandparents and our parents would recognize,” Stephenson said. “This is a way to celebrate our past and who we are and something that has been used as an economic engine on the mainland many times in what the government calls the Main Street program, using cultural history to revitalize towns. Cultural tourism is the fastest growing sector of world tourism. We spend a lot of time looking at mountains, surfing, things like that, but we don’t spend a lot of time celebrating who we are and what makes us special.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.