Hiram Bingham in the New England style of the Hawaiian missionaries, it was constructed between 1836 and 1842 of some 14,000 thousand-pound slabs of coral rock quarried from an offshore reef on the southern coast of Oʻahu.

[5] The church house rivaled the concurrent construction of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace by the Roman Catholic Apostolic Vicariate of the Hawaiian Islands.

Today, the upper gallery of the sanctuary is adorned with 20 portraits of Hawaiian royalty (Aliʻi).

Kamehameha IV and his wife Emma were devout members of the Church of England and established the Anglican Church of Hawaiʻi, which evolved into the present-day Episcopal Diocese of Hawaiʻi after the islands were annexed by the United States and later gained statehood.

When Liliʻuokalani died in 1917, she lay in state in the church for a week before her funeral at Iolani Palace.