Sweet Memories: The Laupahoehoe Train Museum, Hawai'i

Abstract

How does the Laupahoehoe Train Museum on the Big Island of Hawai'i preserve local cultural heritage? In the past, sugar cane dominated the landscape while trains moved harvested cane from fields to mills and transported sugar to ships in Hilo Bay. Both the trains and the cane have disappeared: the Hawai'i Consolidated Railway chose not to rebuild after the devastation of the 1946 tsunami and the sugar industry faced its ultimate demise in the 1990s. This museum is not a typical train museum with ambitions to amass a significant collection of railway cars and railway artifacts arranged and interpreted systematically. Rather, it is a small museum that portrays and documents the history and artifacts of plantation life, and initiates award-winning community outreach programs. In Sweet Memories, Mehos illuminates the interconnected histories of the sugar and rail industries on Hawai'i and how this museum strives to make visible the invisible past.