Its endposts appear to have come from materials dismantled from the old Wailua River Bridge in 1919, and its original trusses were removed during repair work in 1958.

When Hawaiʻi became a United States Territory in 1900, most of its land was held in very few hands, primarily those of large-scale sugar planters and the government itself.

Despite being dominated by the sugar industry, the territorial government sought to encourage the growth of family farms by opening up large tracts of its own land to homesteaders.

[2] The Puʻuʻōpae Bridge was designed to serve tracts of land along Olohena and Waipouli Roads known as Kapaʻa Homesteads 2nd Series, which included 81 lots ranging from roughly 20 to 40 acres, on which 90 homesteaders harvested 31,500 tons of sugarcane by 1917, despite poor roads, limited water, and dependence on the large plantations for milling and marketing their sugar.

Although most of the homestead plots have subsequently been rezoned as residential, the nearly 400 acres surrounding this bridge remain the only significant expanse of agricultural land in the region.