Ahualoa, Hawaii

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Āhualoa is a rural area on the Island of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi County

The name is believed to mean either "long mound" or "long cloud", in the Hawaiian language. The latter is easily understood from the extremely high rainfall and cloud cover that is typical of the area.

[edit] Geography

Aerial view of Ahualoa, showing the interspersed houses, trees and pasture.

Ahualoa is located at 20°03' North, 155°28' West (20.06, -155.48).^GR1

The Old Mamalahoa Highway is the principal road running through Ahualoa. The land is zoned agricultural. A typical lot is 5 acres in size. Land use is for residence and small-scale agriculture, including farming, orchards and livestock.

[edit] History

There is no record of Native Hawaiian settlement in the area that is now Ahualoa. It is likely that the Native Hawaiians visited the area for extraction of resources from the ʻOhia-Hapuʻu native forest, but did not live there, as wet forest was not considered a desirable place to live.

The land of Ahualoa differs from many other parts of Hawaii in that it was never used for either cattle ranching or sugar cane plantations. Instead, in the late 19th and early 20th century it was allocated to families of sugar cane workers as farm homesteads, and remains largely so today. The families, primarily Japanese and Portuguese in ethnicity, were the first inhabitants of the area, and many of the present residents are descended from those families. The original native forest was cleared and replaced by a patchwork of pasture, farms and windbreaks.

In the 1970s, many countercultural families from the mainland US moved to the Ahualoa area. They brought values and ideals of the back to the land movement. A book of material gathered in 2003, Once Upon Ahuloa, explores the experience of this generation with memories and photographs.