Grove Farm, Sugar plantation museum in Lihue, Hawaii.
Grove Farm is a historic plantation site on the island of Kauai, Hawaii, made up of several preserved buildings from the 19th century. These include a main house, worker quarters, outbuildings, gardens, and old steam locomotives that were once used on the property.
German immigrant Hermann A. Widemann started Grove Farm in 1854 as one of Hawaii's first sugarcane plantations. In November 1864 he leased it to manager George Norton Wilcox, who later bought it; the Wilcox family kept it for over a century. In 1881 Princess Ruth Keʻelikolani sold adjoining land that multiplied the acreage about tenfold. The estate was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
The worker houses built between 1913 and 1917 were named Kaipu Camp after the Hawaiian name of a Chinese foreman on the plantation. Behind the main house stands a hexagonal gazebo built in 1898 and styled after a Japanese teahouse. The main house became the Grove Farm Sugar Plantation Museum, visited by appointment.
The site is only open with a guided tour, which does not run every day, so booking ahead is a good idea. The ground is mostly flat and easy to walk, and a full tour takes a couple of hours to complete.
The 2 ft 6 in (762 mm) narrow-gauge locomotives of the Grove Farm Company were kept in a warehouse west of the estate in Puhi, an area also listed on the National Register. Some restored trains run about once a month at the nearby Lihue Plantation Sugar Mill site. The main house, now the Grove Farm Sugar Plantation Museum, is shown by appointment.
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