People ask me all the time where I get my stories. Sometimes I bump into something by accident, while I’m looking for something else.
That happened last year, for instance, when researching the Ward family, I found that Queen Liliuokalani had sewn a Confederate flag for Curtis Perry Ward.
Recently a similar thing happened in researching Honolulu’s oldest school: the Oahu Charity School, founded in 1833.
A reference in the February 1922 issue of Today’s Education said something astonishing: The Hilo Boarding School, founded in 1836, was the model for Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.
The article said, “Hilo Boarding School’s course of study was largely vocational and was used by General Samuel Armstrong as a pattern in organizing the Hampton Institute (Virginia), which in turn became the mother of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute (Alabama).”
I love hearing that Hawaii had an impact on the mainland, and decided to look more into the Hilo Boarding School.
As most of you know, the oldest school in the islands — and the oldest secondary school west of the Mississippi — is Lahainaluna school on Maui. It was originally designed to instruct ministers to work in Hawaii and Polynesia.
Soon after it was established in 1831, the missionaries decided they needed feeder schools around the islands that would prepare students with basics in math, language and religious training before admission to the seminary.
The first one, in 1836, was the Hilo Boarding School, said Ralph Canevali in his book, “Hilo Boarding School: Hawaii’s Experiment in Vocational Education.”
The original school was two grass houses, which were completed at a cost of $140. On Oct. 3, 1836, the school opened with eight boarders, which soon increased to 12. Three years later 28 boys were enrolled. Missionaries, the Rev. David and Sarah Lyman, took charge.
Local chiefs had granted several acres of fertile land to the school, and the students would grow taro and other vegetables.
The young school outgrew its facilities, and David Lyman purchased, in whole, the first shipment of lumber to arrive in Hilo.
The new wood-and-thatch structures he built included a dormitory, schoolhouse, cookhouse and infirmary. Also constructed was a new home for the principal, now known as Lyman House, which today is a museum. The school could accommodate 70 boys.
In its early years the missionaries struggled to instill Christian morals. One rule, laid down in 1841, said that no boy should leave his dormitory without wearing pants.
In the 1840s, tailoring and dairy departments were added to the curriculum. Mapmaking was taught.
In 1849, financial constraints forced the missionaries to turn Lahainaluna over to the kingdom, and feeder schools were forced to rethink their purpose.
One purpose HBS found was the training of teachers. More than one-third of the boys who had attended the school eventually became teachers in the common schools of the kingdom.
In 1850 the minister of public instruction, Richard Armstrong, called HBS “one of our most important schools. It is the very life and soul of our common schools on that large island.”
Interestingly, English was not taught at HBS until 1853. The Protestant missionaries taught in Hawaiian. They felt this allowed them to “to continue their hold over Hawaiians,” Canevali said. “Knowledge of English would encourage the natives to make contacts with unsavory foreigners, particularly seamen, and to forsake their agricultural way of life for the dissolute pleasures of foreign ports.”
Lyman died in 1884. The school he founded and ran for 28 years had become a model for all the common schools of the islands, Canevali said.
HBS produced many educators, clergymen and government officials in jobs that previously had been filled by foreigners.
Vocational activities, such as carpentry, blacksmithing and printing, were added to the curriculum in the 1880s and 1890s.
In 1892 HBS brought electricity to the Big Island. It generated hydroelectric power, and some of it was used to produce the island’s first ice plant.
Five years later school administrators became major stockholders in the newly formed Hilo Electric Light Co. (HELCO).
In the next two decades, coffee, cocoa, banana and pineapple cultivation were added to the agricultural programs, along with livestock. Soon after the first cars arrived in about 1900, auto mechanics was taught.
This kind of practical education was ahead of its time. The Bureau of Education in Washington, D.C., remarked in 1920 that HBS preceded the first vocational school on the mainland (Boston in 1878) by 40 years.
By the 1920s, however, the times were changing. Nearly every community had public schools, and the need for HBS diminished. Most of the school facilities were turned over to the Hilo Standard English School (later called Riverside Elementary).
During World War II the Army occupied the school’s dormitories, and after, different community groups used them until its buildings came down, between 1968 and 1972.
Even though the Hilo Boarding School is gone, a part of it has taken root on the mainland.
One sprout is the Hampton Institute in Virginia. It was founded by Civil War Brig. Gen. Samuel C. Armstrong in 1867. Armstrong had fought for the Union Army at Gettysburg.
Armstrong was born in Wailuku to Richard Armstrong, the minister of public instruction mentioned above.
Following the Civil War, Armstrong founded the Hampton Institute as a vocational school for displaced freedmen of the South. It was based on Hilo Boarding School’s model.
Hampton turned out teachers who went on to educate thousands of newly freed slaves across the South. One of them was Booker T. Washington. Upon graduation, at 25, he moved to Alabama, where he founded and became principal of Tuskegee University. He taught students practical farming and trade skills.
By 1900 Tuskegee had more than 100 faculty members and 1,400 students. Today, U.S. News and World Reports ranks Tuskegee as the fifth “Best Regional College in the South.”
The Virginia Historical Society said that the “Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute trained an army of black educators, and those teachers emphasized self-improvement and job training to enable black students to become gainfully employed and self-supporting as craftsmen or industrial workers.”
In Hawaii the U.S. named Fort Armstrong, makai of Ala Moana Boulevard, for the local boy-turned-Civil War general.
In his autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” Booker T. Washington stated that what made the greatest impression on him at Hampton was Samuel Armstrong, “the noblest, rarest human being that it has ever been my privilege to meet.”
“One might have removed from Hampton all the buildings, class-rooms, teachers, and industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would have been a liberal education.”
Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.