Spirit of Aloha | Features | July/August 2004

Sleeping with History
Bed and breakfast on the volcano’s edge
By Sophia V. Schweitzer

We are just caretakers,” says Michael Tucker. “That’s all we are. The old caretaker worked here for 30 years. Listen, it’s as if his energy is still around.

We are standing in the enormous living room of the red-roofed, wood-shingled and turreted main house of the old Dillingham Estate on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. A liquid light dusted with flecks of sun filters through large windows. Facing us, a manicured lawn, with Japanese cedars, rhododendrons and azaleas fronts a rain forest of giant tree ferns and gnarly, mist-dripping ‘ohi‘a trees. We are between two worlds. Just 12 miles away from this idyllic scene, in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, a relentless flow of devastating lava streams from Kïlauea’s Pu‘u ‘O‘o vent. Here it is ethereally quiet.

I am on a pilgrimage to find places that might connect me to a slower past, to cross invisible bridges between old and new. My quest has brought me to the cradle of the Big Island’s visitor industry and a region far from sunny, leeward beaches and resorts. Hidden on the rainy Hilo side and on volcanic slopes exist a handful of properties where the footsteps of long-ago travelers resonate on koa stairways and bedrooms inspire a sweet nostalgia. These are the retreats of early 19th-century families, built in the years when Hilo was an important merchant town, home to cattle ranchers and sugar pioneers, and when Kïlauea—the most active volcano on Earth—was the only Big Island attraction to draw visitors near.

Originally the summer home for a sugar plantation manager in ‘Ola‘a, built in 1931, the secluded property I am visiting was acquired during World War II by the Dillinghams, a family well-known for its involvement in railroads, sugar, dredging and construction. They kept it for three decades. Glancing at the antiques, the wooden floors, the spaciousness, I can almost taste the leisure of the estate’s former owners, and I imagine the cold evenings they spent in front of a fireplace with glasses of cognac.

Tuttle acquired the place in 1992 and has transformed it with thoughtful respect and poetic playfulness into a bed-and-breakfast named Hale ‘Ohi‘a Cottages. There is the old redwood water tank, for example, now known prosaically as No. 44, a romantic split-level cottage with skylights, divided by a see-through fireplace. The gardner’s shed, named ‘Ihilani, an octagonal hideaway, features its own private garden area. Outside is a Japanese hot tub bordering a rain forest, in which you can sit and gaze at the stars on clear nights.

In the early 1840s, the Big Island could only be reached after a three-week schooner voyage from Honolulu, when weather and winds were favorable. The 30-mile climb from Hilo Harbor to Volcano, which took most of one day, involved caravans of horses, carriages, hogs and dozens of servants to carry the gear. At a 4,000-foot elevation, where winds and rain were bitterly cold, shelter was a luxury.

It is known that, in 1846, Benjamin Pitman Sr., a savvy sugar planter, built a grass shack on the crater rim and started charging a dollar a night to sleep in it. His enterprise, which he named Volcano House, was probably the Big Island’s first tourist hotel. It was a success. This had as much to do with its location as its welcome amenities. Pele, the goddess of fire, intermittently sent lava spewing down the slopes of Kïlauea and Mauna Loa. It was a colossal sight. Explorers arrived from all corners of the world to study or admire the volcanoes. Ladies were “advised to wear bloomers,” by early guidebooks.

The evolution of the Volcano House has been well documented. In 1866, it became a permanent frame structure with ‘ohi‘a poles, two separate bedrooms and reasonably soft mattresses stuffed with pulu grass. In time, its existence in this earthquake-riddled landscape became as much a surprise as the hissing, sputtering volcano. Mark Twain, one of the first to notice this, wrote that year how “a good hotel in such an outlandish spot startled me considerably more than the volcano did.”

In 1877, a new Volcano House replaced the inn. It featured high-ceilinged ‘ohi‘a rafters, hand-hewn, unfinished wood, six rooms and a spacious verandah that overlooked the crater. It is said that the fire started in the fireplace that year is still burning today, through embers that were carefully carried to the hearth in what is the current Volcano House, built in 1941.

The new Volcano House, I must admit, yielded few links to my mission. Nothing matched the magical views of Kïlauea Crater and Halema‘uma‘u caldera from its bar and dining room. Cradling a cup of hot tea in my hands, I meditated upon barren grays shrouded in wisps of steam and lit by the yellow pompons of lehua blossoms. ‘Ohelo berry shrubs, seeking life, struggled on the crater’s floor. An ‘apapane flitted by—a vermillion flash.

I thought: We’ve traveled to see moonscapes like this for 200 years.

Today, the 1877 structure of the old Volcano House is home to the Volcano Art Center. It’s an appropriate venue. There is something about artists in this rugged, elemental area that enhances the spirit of romance. “Artists make the connection between old and new,” says Lorna Jeyte, who was born on Maui and has been in love with the volcano since her first visit at age 3. “In ancient Hawai‘i, no one lived here. It was too cold. Then came the houses with fireplaces and the cultured gardens with camellias, things so contrary to the natural beauty of the forest. Artists, it seems, make the transition between primordial geology and modern civilization, between häpu‘u ferns and hydrangea.”

With her husband, Albert, Jeyte owns Kïlauea Lodge, in the eyes of many a cross between a Swiss ski chalet and a Hawaiian plantation home, with plenty of local art displayed in its charming rooms and cottages. Started as a mountain center for YMCA youths in 1938, Hale o Aloha has become an artistic, aesthetic, butter-yellow, teal-blue and white-trimmed retreat for upscale visitors who appreciate Albert’s European-themed, Hawaiian-flavored gourmet cuisine, Lorna’s personal management and, of course, the heated towel racks. As we know it today, Kïlauea Lodge opened in 1988.

With her husband, Albert, Jeyte owns Kïlauea Lodge, in the eyes of many a cross between a Swiss ski chalet and a Hawaiian plantation home, with plenty of local art displayed in its charming rooms and cottages. Started as a mountain center for YMCA youths in 1938, Hale o Aloha has become an artistic, aesthetic, butter-yellow, teal-blue and white-trimmed retreat for upscale visitors who appreciate Albert’s European-themed, Hawaiian-flavored gourmet cuisine, Lorna’s personal management and, of course, the heated towel racks. As we know it today, Kïlauea Lodge opened in 1988.

On many winter evenings, volcano temperatures dip into the 50s and below. This is when chilled hikers and romance-seeking couples, seeking warmth and companionship, gather in the lodge’s grand dining room, with its high-beamed cedar ceiling, polished Douglas fir floor and koa wood tables. Here, at its center, burns a Fireplace of Friendship, conceived by YMCA leader Harold Lucas as a symbol of global brotherhood. His network of connections over a period of five years provided objects and messages from around the world that became part of the solid, blue-rock hearth. Among them are a piece of the Acropolis, a tomahawk, a dinosaur vertebra and an ancient Hawaiian kukui nut pounder. For rest and relaxation, there is nothing like sinking into the couch in front of it.

A five-minute walk away from Kïlauea Lodge is My Island Bed & Breakfast Inn, a 7-acre botanical estate owned since 1985 by Joann and Gordon Morse, and now managed by their daughter, Ki‘i.

The bumpy, unpaved wagon road that led to the main house made me wonder, only to discover that its potholes are precisely where the story of this farmhouse begins. Waiting to greet me was writer and storyteller Gordon Morse, a longtime resident of the area who had real-life, passionate stories to tell. “In 1867, the greatest earthquake ever recorded here hit Kïlauea Crater through South Point and all of Ka‘u,” he says. “It shook down every house and every stone wall. It devastated the area. The tops of cinder cones avalanched down and covered entire villages in ash. It is said that a human could not remain standing and had to lie down. Eighty or 90 died.”

Morse tells me how missionaries from Hilo and Kona took their wagons with food and clothing to the victims in Ka‘u. When the axle of a wagon driven by Hilo missionary David Lyman broke, he spent the night in the cold of the volcano, underneath his cart, fixing it the next day. “Years later,” notes Morse, “he asked the king to buy the land so that one day he might build a summer home. This driveway of ours, the one you drove up just now, is thought to be the last remnant of that old road. Because the inn is on the National Register of Historic Places, the road was never paved.”

The Lymans’ retreat, built in 1886 and named Hale ‘Ohu, House in the Mist, is the oldest surviving building in Volcano, a replica of farmhouses in Connecticut. It was a more simple building in the 19th century, of course, and the old carriage space has now been turned into a breakfast and living room, where guests can feast on all-you-can-eat pancake and French-toast meals while they gather around an 1867 Edwina Jackson model fireplace. Other small details reveal a different life, with hooks, pegs and the conspicuous absence of closet space, all telling of great frugality. The original, and once the only bathroom still features a two-inch-thick, redwood Japanese furo with copper plating. It is a reminder of the creativity that was necessary in missionary years, since Western-style baths did not yet exist in Hawai‘i.

The Lymans moved back to Hilo during World War II, but kept the house for storage. The Morses were able to buy it from the Lyman family in 1972, after the opening of downtown Hilo’s new Lyman Museum, which was large enough to display the possessions of one of Hilo’s earliest and most influential kama‘äina families.

Travelers then, as now, also needed beds in Hilo, so on a rainy Saturday afternoon, I drove over a narrow wooden bridge to Reed’s Island and the beautifully preserved, cream-colored Shipman House, with its turret, hand-rolled, curved-glass windows, dark-green louvers, copper gutters and impossibly high carriage step. West of the Wailuku River and bordering a stream close to a forbidden royal spring, the two-story house was built in 1899 by Jack Wilson, a man who dealt in horse-and-buggy rentals and, conveniently, was the first entrepreneur to sell paid volcano tours.

he story goes that about 40 years earlier, a missionary named the Rev. Shipman stopped off in the Islands on his way to Micronesia. His wife, Jane, was in the final months of her first pregnancy. It was suggested that the couple stay in Hawai‘i, and they did. Eventually, the child, W.H. “Willie” Shipman, would create a ranching empire. He would also marry a Hawaiian woman of royal blood, Mary Kahiwa‘aiali‘i Johnson, a close friend to Hawai‘i’s beloved last queen, Lili‘uokalani. In 1901, Willie Shipman bought Wilson’s house as a gift for his wife. Here, they raised seven children and entertained famous guests.

Queen Lili‘uokalani often visited Shipman in the years after the sad overthrow of her monarchy. Seated at the koa dining table, with a view of Coconut Island and Hilo Bay, she feasted on lü‘au lunches. After lunch, she played the grand piano
—still in use today—and smoked her cigar.

More of a misfit, with rather socialist views, was another guest, the writer Jack London. He arrived with a letter: “I have taken the liberty of giving Mr. and Mrs. Jack London a letter of introduction to you,” began Lorrin Thurston in his letter to Willie Shipman, his father-in-law, in 1907. Thurston was publisher of The Advertiser in Honolulu, where London and his wife, Charmian, were stranded. Thurston reasoned that Kïlauea would give London plenty to write about.

London stayed with the Shipmans for five weeks, and an unexpected friendship evolved. In London’s old bedroom, located downstairs behind the library, there is still evidence of his presence. In the Shipman House’s current logbook, a visitor has signed her name as “his mistress.” This inscription is a small leap of the imagination as one sits in the wicker rockers on the verandah where London wrote, and happily reads his work.

or 50 years, a Chinese cook made a daily cornbread for the Shipmans. The recipe is still used by Barbara Ann Andersen, Willie’s great-granddaughter, who makes cornbread for guests at what is now an exclusive bed-and-breakfast. Andersen bought the house from the Shipman Estate in 1993, with her husband, Gary. It had been neglected for more than 10 years. “It was Halloween night when we arrived,” she recalls. “We found our haunted house—all cobwebs, dust, creaky hinges.”
We walk up the grand staircase, past period pieces, to an antique elevator that, in 1930, was the first of its kind in Hilo, and was hand-operated by strong servants or cowboys from the ranch. We pass heirloom furnishings, a library with out-of-print books and antiques. I look out at dilapidated stairs that lead to an abandoned greenhouse overgrown with ferns. History, indeed.

The following day I reach the end of my journey. The past is present. And do I dare mention that throughout my trip I savored all the comforts of modernity: heated towel racks, hot toast with passion-fruit butter, hot showers, warm sweaters, a reliable car and a bottle of good wine? Call me a dreamer. A romantic faithful to the Proustian sentiment. Above all, a pragmatic traveler. It really was a perfect pilgrimage.

The caretakers of Volcano see to that.

SOPHIA V. SCHWEITZER is the author of Kohala ‘Aina, A History of North Kohala, which won a Kahili and Best-of-Show in the 2004 Keep it Hawai‘i awards. She contributes to numerous magazines and is currently working on two books..

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