Adobe Schoolhouse

Cool, spacious, and generous in the proportions of its length, breadth, lofty ceiling, and deeply recessed windows, the room is representative of early missionary days to the Sandwich Islands.

When the adobe blocks were first laid, Honolulu was a village of thatched houses straggling along across a barren, dusty plain.

Structures of native thatch were frail and temporary as evidenced by the mention of the first missionary school house, which was more than twice as long as the Adobe Schoolhouse, its successor.

Dr. Judd wrote the ABCFM in Boston on October 23, 1833:—[1] "The fine large school house built at our station was blown down last fall and all the benches, doors, etc., were crushed in the ruins.

* ** It was altogether too large, 120 feet long *** badly lighted, having no glass windows, the seats and desks of the rudest kind imaginable, the former being made of mud bricks piled up in rows, and the latter of boards nailed to legs driven into the ground... Mr. Bingham has succeeded in inducing the natives to rebuild it, and when I left home, the work had commenced.

Mr. W. R. Castle, in an article upon it for the Cousins' Society at the time of its restoration in 1920, quotes the first mention of it from the minutes of the General Meeting of the mission "in June–July, 1835," where the statement appears:—[1] "Convened in the School House at 9 a. m., June 4th, 1835."

In October 1837, Mother Cooke, who arrived that year as one of the brides of the missionary reinforcement, gave a description of the then new school house.

In a diary written for her younger sister in the U.S., she said:—[1] "We have a very good school house built of mud and plastered inside and out with lime made of coral.

The school furniture was all made of soft white pine and it was not long before it began to show that not even missionary boys with sharp knives could resist the temptation to do a little artistic carving.

[1] According to Asa Thurston in his presidential address to the "Cousins", in the first annual meeting, in 1853, the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society was established in this building, on June 5, 1852.

Sometimes opinion varied, and the brethren 'warmed to the subject' -but the session ended with the hymn, 'Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love,' and it did bind-and they parted in good fellowship.

The busy, practical mothers of the Mission exchanged patterns, and receipts, and re-trimmed their bonnets that came around Cape Horn to Honolulu models, and held prayerful 'Maternal Meetings' between sessions in the schoolhouse...

This Maternal Association carefully recorded the birth of every child born into the Mission, and published the Blue Book.

[1] By 1920, the centennial year of the ABCFM's Hawaiian Protestant Mission, the adobe block walls, exposed to wind and weather by holes in the roof, were in danger of crumbling away altogether.

This condition was recognized as a calamity by a group of "mission children" who, inspired by the enthusiasm of one of their number, Mrs. Harriet Castle-Coleman, promptly decided to restore it so that it was once again useful.

When this was done, there was a final balance of between US$8 and US$9, which was turned over in the Spring of 1924 to Miss Lawrence to apply towards fitting up the rooms for the occupation as Headquarters of the Association.