Life on a Hawaii Sugar Plantation

Once they had been reunited with their families and were fed, they were met by representatives from the Sugar and Pineapple plantations who gave them their work assignments and signed them up for housing. Single men were given the option of higher pay, but they would live in a boarding house where they would pay for room and board. The married men and their families were provided with a home and a plot of land to grow a vegetable garden and to raise chickens etc. As promised, there was free (mandatory) school for their children and free medical care. Within each plantation they were divided into camps with camps being spread out about a mile from each other. The plantations would try to assign families and friends to the same camp.

There were different sizes of houses to accommodate families with the majority having four rooms. The houses also included a storage room to keep the wood they used for cooking. They had both indoor and outdoor cooking area with a beehive oven outside for baking bread. For the most part, the women cooked outside.

Due to the amount of rain that would fall during a tropical storm, the houses were placed on stilts that raised the house about three feet off of the ground. This not only protected the houses from rivers created by the rains, but provided shade for their chickens, pigs and milk cows during the heat of the day. The roof was made from galvanized steel allowing them to collect the rain water in buckets placed at the corners of the house. This fresh water was used for cooking in addition to bathing and the washing of clothes. The houses were white-washed yearly to keep down the bug population.

They did not have electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. They had community toilets, which they placed sacks on the doorways for privacy. The outhouses were white-washed and treated with lime to absorb order and keep the flies away; the waste was collected, and used as fertilizer both in the sugar cane fields and in their family gardens.

It did not take long for families to settle into their homes, the women would plant flowers including roses, carnations, and daisies and the men would turn their small plot into a vegetable garden filled with tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, peppers, and garbanzos. The rain and the warm Hawaiian climate were perfect for growing vegetables; these were the foods they used to feed their families. All around were coconut, bananas and guava trees. What they could not grow, they bought from at the company store. When they purchased items, it was on the credit system, with the amount of their purchases deducted from their monthly pay.

The life of women was basically the same as it was back in Spain; they raised the children, kept the home, cooked and baked. Some women would even bake additional loaves of bread to sell. The Spanish tradition of baking bread used yeast made from potatoes mixed with their flour, a sour dough starter; this made it sweeter and more desirable to the Hawaiian women compared to the bread the Portuguese women baked. Women also had the option of working for the plantation owners, with their pay added to their husband/father. They also sold eggs, cow and goat’s milk, cheese and fresh produce.

Six days a week, from sun up until sunset, the men and those women without children, would work for wages; some in the fields, or in the mill itself.  Muleskinners earned an additional dollar a day as they not only drove the mules that moved the cane from field to mill, but cared for the animals. There were three plantings of cane a year, providing for work year round.

 In the field the men would cut and discard the top six or so inches of the cane with the soft leaves, the next foot of plant would be kept to use in the next planting, with the remaining of the plant being collected and sent by mule wagons to the mill for processing. This was tedious work from sunrise to sunset. They used a 20 inch knife to cut the cane. There was a hook at the end of the knife blade to help pick up the cane. The field workers were tired and sore by the end of their very long day

Once the mule wagon arrived at the mill, there were more workers who used their knives to unload the cane and placed into troughs. The Mill would then crush the cane forcing the juice to run into vats. There the sugar juice was crystallized. Some plantations would use trains to aid in moving the cane from field to mill.

In addition to planting and harvesting, the men would clear new land to prepare them for planting. For the most part, there was no need for irrigation because the majority of the plantations received enough rain to water the fields.

They would be paid monthly, with the earnings of the whole family being recorded and paid through the head of house; charges at the company store would be taken out before they were paid. There were no banks on the plantations, so if they wanted to keep their money in the bank they would take the train to Hilo, many of the Spanish workers would bury it thus using the “Spanish bank.”

In school, the children quickly learned to speak English this enabled them to communicate beyond their small community and make friends with children from other countries. Each plantation had a school in one of its camps. The children had to get themselves to school, sometimes walking several miles. The schools kept careful record of who attended, and if a child did not attend, they had to have a note from the camp doctor.

Each camp had doctors that would care of the workers and their families. The modest Spanish women preferred to follow the traditions of their homeland and utilized the services of the midwives that lived in the camps. Just 3 ½ months after the Heliopolis arrived, one woman gave birth to a little girl; she was baptized in St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Hilo, as were most of the other children born in Hawaii.

I am not certain which plantation our family was assigned to, it is quite possible that it was with the Pepeekeo Sugar Company as the family was living in Pepeekeo when Grandpa and Grandma were married.

The Pepeekeo Sugar Company was located on the windward side of the island of Hawaii between Onomea and Honomu. The plantation was approximately four miles long and ran along the ocean cliffs.