Mākena History: The Landing, Keawalaʻi Church and the Lava

A port, not a resort

Captain James Makee was a Massachusetts whaler who settled in Hawaiʻi in 1843 and acquired the ʻUlupalakua estate by 1858, turning it into Rose Ranch and later ʻUlupalakua Ranch. It became the largest ranch on Maui, running more than 5,000 head of cattle and sending about a thousand a year to market in Honolulu through the landing at Mākena.

By the 1920s Mākena Bay was one of the busiest ports on Maui, with interisland steamers calling and over a hundred families living in the area. Then Kahului Harbour was improved, traffic moved north, and the population fell away. The military dismantled the landing's pier during the Second World War and homes near it were razed.

Worth a correction while we're here: Mākena is often described as a whaling port. We found no source supporting that. Makee was a whaler who became a rancher, and what shipped through Mākena was cattle.

Keawalaʻi, 1832

Keawalaʻi Congregational Church sits at 5300 Mākena Road, and its own history dates its founding to 1832, when it was the Church of Honuaʻula. The first building was pili grass; it was later rebuilt in stone and wood. It's affiliated with the United Church of Christ and still holds Sunday services.

For anyone navigating this coast, the church is also the most useful landmark on Mākena Road. The public beach right-of-way lot for Maluaka Beach sits directly opposite it.

The lava is much older than the guidebooks say

Drive south past the end of the beaches and the road runs out into black rock. That's the Kalua o Lapa flow, East Maui's youngest lava, which erupted from Haleakalā's lower southwest rift zone and formed Cape Kīnaʻu and the eastern edge of La Perouse Bay.

You will read almost everywhere that it erupted in 1790. USGS dates it to between A.D. 1420 and 1620. The old date came from mid-twentieth-century work that leaned partly on comparing early European expedition charts. Paleomagnetic measurements didn't match flows of that era, and charcoal recovered from beneath the flow and beneath spatter at the vent returned radiocarbon ages calibrating to roughly A.D. 1400 to 1640.

USGS is unusually candid that this isn't fully settled, and the reason is worth repeating. Hawaiians questioned in 1841 said their grandparents had seen the flow, which points to something closer to 1750. USGS's own write-up says the effort to resolve the discrepancy is unfinished, and that oral history is important and not to be overlooked among the numbers from laboratories. We'd rather leave both on the page than flatten it.

Puʻu Olaʻi

The cone between Big Beach and Oneʻuli is the reason this stretch of coast looks the way it does. USGS maps Puʻu Olaʻi as a cinder and spatter cone of the Hāna Volcanics, dated between 13,000 and 30,000 years old.

Its erosion is where Oneʻuli's dark sand comes from, and it's why Little Beach sits hidden on the far side. You'll see a height of 360 feet quoted for it in a lot of places. We couldn't find that figure in any USGS or federal record, so we're leaving it out.