William Herbert Purvis (November 27, 1858 – December 31, 1950) was a plant collector and investor in a sugarcane plantation on the island of Hawaiʻi during the late nineteenth century.

[2] A distant cousin, Edith Mary Winifred Purvis, also came to Hawaii and married into the Holdsworth family; their daughter married into the Greenwell family (early Kona coffee merchants) and had daughter Amy B. H. Greenwell (1920–1974).

[4][5][6] The Purvis family were early investors in the Pacific Sugar Mill at Kukuihaele near Waipiʻo Valley on the northeast coast "Big Island" of Hawaiʻi.

[7] The lands were from the estate of King Lunalilo, consolidated by Purvis and the royal doctor Georges Phillipe Trousseau.

[13] In 1887, Purvis hired Scottish arboriculturalist David McHattie Forbes from his position as Foreman Forester of the estate of Fletcher's Saltoun Hall to import and cultivate cinchona trees above the sugar line in Kukuihaele, Hawaii at the Pacific Sugar Mill.