Tag Archives: janet oakley

Volcano House: Sharing Aloha on a Crater’s Rim

Posted on by August 19, 2019

Cozy mystery author Janet Oakley recounts the fascinating history of how Volcano House Hotel near Kīlauea Crater’s rim came to be.

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Janet Oakley author photoRelevant History welcomes back historical fiction author Janet Oakley, a history nerd and amateur gardener. Her fiction spans the mid-19th century to WW II with characters standing up for something in their own time and place. Her writing has been recognized with a 2013 Bellingham Mayor’s Arts Award, the Chanticleer Grand Prize for Tree Soldier, Goethe Grand Prize for The Jøssing Affair, 2018 Will Rogers Silver Medallion and 2018 WILLA Silver Awards for Mist-chi-mas: A Novel of Captivity. Timber Rose was a 2015 WILLA Award finalist. A UH Manoa grad, she has special memories of the 1877 Volcano House, often teaching there. To learn more about Janet and her books, visit her web site, and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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The island of Oahu has Diamond Head. Maui has Haleakala. But neither of these compare to the Big Island of Hawai’i’s active volcano at Kīlauea. Sacred to the Hawaiian goddess, Pele, and the darling of volcanologists worldwide, Kīlauea captured the imaginations of Europeans from their very first visit in the late 1790s. Soon, travelers from all over the world began to show up to see its “lava lakes.”

Early tourists on Kīlauea Crater’s rim
Volcano House Register Hikers 1890In 1823, Reverend William Ellis, an Englishman, made such a visit with American missionary, Asa Thurston. It was arduous journey of nearly twenty miles starting down by the ocean, crossing a lava desert and eventually arriving at the north end of Kilauea Crater. Ellis wrote, “We stopped and trembled.” He then went on to describe Kīlauea:

Immediately before us yawned an immense gulf, in the form of a crescent, about two miles in length, from north-east to south-west, nearly a mile in width, and apparently 800 feet deep. The bottom was covered with lava.

On the north rim of the crater, their Hawaiian guides set up a hut for the night made of “a few green branches of trees, some fern leaves and rushes…” This was most likely one of the first tourist lodgings for travelers.

The 1840s brought both sightseers and explorers to Kīlauea. Between December 1840 and January 1841, the US Exploring Expedition, led by Lt. Charles Wilkes, visited Kīlauea while doing a survey trip to the summit of Mauna Loa. With steady arrivals to the rim, a Hawaiian is said to have set up hut where he sold food to visitors. In 1846 Benjamin Pitman from Salem, Massachusetts, erected a one room grass shelter at the crater’s rim. For a dollar a day a visitor could sleep on a mat floor. He soon gave up the enterprise, but he left a name for the structure—Volcano House.

Volcano House 1866 NPS Hawai'i Volcanoes National ParkIn 1866, George W.C. Jones of Keauhou, Hawaii, who had made his fortune in pulu (a popular soft fiber from the hapu’u fern and used for upholstery stuffing), went in partnership with Charles and Jules Richardson to build a more substantial wood structure. Overlooking Kilauea Crater, the building had a pili thatch roof with four bedrooms, parlor, and dining room inside. Mark Twain came for a visit in 1866 and wrote about Volcano House in Roughing It:

Neat, roomy, well-furnished and a well-kept hotel. The surprise of finding a good hotel at such an outlandish spot startled me, considerably more than the volcano did.

Six years later, another famous personage visited Volcano House. Englishwomen Isabella Bird was already well known as a travel writer and explorer when she arrived on the Big Island in 1872 to climb Mauna Loa. She later wrote of arriving at Volcano House in the dark:

Rarely was light more welcome than that which twinkled from under the verandah of the lonely crater house into the rainy night. The hospitable landlord of this unique dwelling lifted me from my horse, and carried me into a pleasant room thoroughly warmed by a large wood fire…

A new building, more visitors
By 1877, Volcano House was overflowing with visitors who came to watch Kīlauea’s live eruptions and lava lakes from the inn’s porch. It was time to build a larger, more comfortable Volcano House Hotel. The three partners hired architect Willian Lentz to accomplish this. Lentz’s design was the first Western-styled structure in Volcano. Doors, windows and building materials were brought from the coast of Keauhou on horseback and two-wheeled carts. The rafters, posts and studs for the hotel were hand hewn from native ‘ohi‘a and naio (false sandalwood) hardwood. This new inn boasted a central main room with fireplace, six guest rooms to the right of it, and a parlor and manager’s quarters to the left. Colonel John Henry and Emma Maby were hired to run it. A travel writer from San Francisco in 1880 glowed about the rooms and bed being “scrupulously clean…and the fare of excellent variety…”

In 1889, Robert Louis Stevenson visited the Big Island, but did not go up due to his health.

In 1893, Volcano House went under another remodel. A two-story addition of fourteen rooms was added onto the left end of the original structure, becoming the main part of the hotel. An observation tower and a larger dining hall were also added. The main room of the 1877 structure was now the “parlor.”

A new life and purpose
1907 Postcard of VH showing the 2 story addition from 1891Over the decades, Volcano House changed owners several times. When the Inter-Island Steam Navigation Company took over in in 1921, a new two-story wing was built, bringing the number of rooms to 115. Sadly, the 1877 structure was sawn apart and moved to a new location away from the cliff. There it served as quarters for the hotel employees and sometimes furniture storage. In 1940, it briefly functioned as an interim lobby and bar when the 1921 Volcano House burned down. It began to fall into disrepair after today’s present hotel was built.

In 1971, nearly 100 years after it was constructed, a local photographer and architect student rented the deserted 1877 building for a wilderness photography class. The classes were so successful that the photographer approached the Park Superintendent with the idea of using the building on a permanent basis. Volcano residents interested in the arts joined in.

In 1974, permission was granted. Now listed on the National Register as Hawai’i’s oldest visitor accommodation, the 1877 Volcano House displays the works of three hundred Hawai’i artists and presents cultural programs as the Volcano Art Center. From a grass hut in the 1840s during the time of the Royal Hawaiian Kingdom through territory and statehood and its latest manifestation, Volcano House has always brought aloha to visitors coming to stand in awe of nature on the rim of the world’s most accessible volcano, Kīlauea.

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Volcano House book coverA big thanks to Janet Oakley! She’ll give away one ebook copy of her cozy mystery, Volcano House, to one person who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available worldwide.

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Climbing Mountains in Skirts

Posted on by August 19, 2014

Janet Oakley author photoRelevant History welcomes Janet Oakley, historian and award winning author of historical fiction. Her book Tree Soldier won the 2012 EPIC ebook award for historical fiction and the 2013 grand prize for Chanticleer Books Reviews. Another long work, The Jossing Affair, won first place in historical fiction Chanticleer Books Reviews. Janet has essays in the “Cup of Comfort” series, writings in the Clover Literary Rag, and historical articles on Washington State history. Timber Rose is the prequel to Tree Soldier. When she’s not writing, Oakley can be seen wearing petticoats and teaching 19th-century life, hands-on, to kids. To learn more, check out Janet’s blog and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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I have always loved to camp and tramp. From a very early age, I went tent camping with my family all over the Northeast and eventually the West. It was always a magical time (admittedly, miserable if it rained too much), for to be in nature was for me instructional and energizing.

I never thought much of how these places came to be until I was an adult. When I needed a paper for a university class, I began to pay attention to the stories my mom told me of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in Idaho where she grew up. The CCC made trails, planted trees, and built cabins, ranger stations, and fire look-outs back in the 1930s. My historical novel Tree Soldier, about a CCC camp in the North Cascades of Washington State, came out of my research. Its prequel, Timber Rose, explores the work of earlier, pioneering people who built an appreciation for the wilderness and the need to preserve it.

The Pacific NW and the Birth of Hiking Clubs
The North Cascades, the setting for Timber Rose, is a beautiful, rugged area in the north of Washington State. Until 1889, the state was a territory. Formed in 1852, it was one of longest held territories seeking statehood. Though it became a state, Washington had over 2.25 million acres in the federally held Pacific Forest Reserves. In 1897, the Forest Bureau was created by an act of Congress, with Gifford Pinchot as head. Eight years later (1905) 63 million acres of forest nationwide was transferred from the Interior Department to the Agriculture Department. At the same time, the modern Forest Service was created. The Pacific Forest Reserves on the east side of Puget Sound became the Washington National Forest.

Mount BakerAgainst this dry history, inspired by the writings of John Muir and other nature writers, some amazing things happened. In 1890, a group of climbers, which included 21-year-old Fay Fuller wearing blue flannel bloomers and a boy’s boots with caulks, climbed Mount Rainier. The following year a group of climbers made it to the top of Mount Baker (Mount Kulshan in my novels) in the North Cascades. In the next couple of years, wilderness enthusiasts organized. In 1894, on the summit of Mount Hood, Oregon, the Mazamas was formed. Of its 105 members, a good portion were women.

The Mazamas played an important part in developing trails and shelters in the Washington National Forest. They formed a branch of the club in Seattle and took on Mount Baker in 1906. Catherine Montgomery, a founding faculty member of the Normal School in Bellingham, WA, was on that climb. She would later be called the mother of the Pacific Crest Trail that runs from California to the Canadian border.

Mountaineering circa 1900Two years after the Forest Service came into being, the Seattle branch of the Mazamas split off and became The Mountaineers, whose aims were “to explore the mountains, forests, and water courses of the Pacific NW…” They played a major role in the greater outdoor community.

Not Held Back by Petticoats
Cora Smith EatonFrom the 1890s on, women hiked and climbed in the Pacific NW. Though bound by fashion that corseted and skirted them on the main street, they were ingenious in getting around a few rules. In some instances, they wore bloomers but many times they went in their skirts, with knickerbockers underneath. Or just wool pants. In 1909, when a number of women climbed Mount Rainier during a suffragette convention in Seattle, group leader Cora Smith Eaton compiled a list of what to bring:

1. Sleeping Bag, consisting of three bags, one inside the other.

  • Waterproof shell, of kahki (sic) or rubber or parafined (sic) canvas or oiled silk.
  • Double wool blanket bag.
  • Comfort padded with wool bats, the comfort folded and sewed together as a bag.

2. Tramping suit:

  • Bloomers or knickerbockers.
  • Short skirt, knee length, discarded on the hard climbs.
  • Wool wait or jumper.
  • Sweater or heavy coat.

3. Three pairs of cotton hose.
4. Three pairs of boys’ wool socks to wear as the second pair of hose to prevent chafing.
5. Mountain boots to the knee, with heavy soles, heavy enough for hob-nails, and these must be placed in soles before starting, using 3 1/2 eighths Hungarian nails in the instep as well as the heels and soles.
6. Lighter shoes, like tennis shoes, for camp.
7. Gaiters to wear with the light shoes.
8. Chamois heel protectors, worn next to the skin, or adhesive plaster, to prevent blistering the heel.
9. Two winter undersuits, ankle length and long sleeves.
10. Two lighter undersuits, ankle length and long sleeves.
11. One dark colored night robe or pajamas.
12. Hat, lightweight, with medium brim.
13. Mosquito head net or bee veil.
14. Smoked goggles.
15. Heavy gauntlet gloves.
16. Three bandana handkerchiefs.
17. Rubber poncho, or slicker coat.

The climb was successful. On the summit, the group placed a flag with the AYP (Alaska-Yukon-Pacific fair) symbol with a Votes for Women banner underneath.

No Slouches at Home
Many of the women who climbed came from the middle class. Wives of UW faculty or professors themselves, local enthusiasts from logging communities around the mountains, or business owners. Dr. Cora Smith Eaton was one such woman. The first woman to practice medicine in ND, she came to the northwest for a suffragette convention in 1907. She climbed Mount Hood and later moved to Seattle. She was one of the co-founders of the Mountaineers. Another, Mary Davenport Engberg, ran a pharmacy in Bellingham, WA with her husband. She was an active outdoorswoman who made numerous expeditions to Mount Baker, naming a number of its features, including Bastille and No Name Glaciers. She was also an accomplished violinist and conductor. She started a 65-piece orchestra.

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Timber Rose book coverA big thanks to Janet Oakley. She’ll give away a trade paperback copy of Timber Rose to someone who contributes a comment on my blog this week. I’ll choose the winner from among those who comment by Friday at 6 p.m. ET. Delivery is available within the U.S. only.

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