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Alexander and Baldwin Museum
The Alexander and Baldwin Sugar
Museum is located next to the biggest working sugar factory in the
historical town of Puunene, Maui, Hawaii, which has won numerous
awards for its outstanding repository of exhibits and documentation
about the island's most important and influential periods in its
history. This museum is devoted to saving and showcasing the
marvelous history and heritage of the island's sugar business,
inside an 1800 square foot facility that has charted and beginning
and growth of this excellent industry, as well as its influence on
the development of the island's water resources and diverse
multi-ethnic population, and the interesting displays about the
inner workings of a sugar mill. The marvelous museum contains six
display rooms and outdoor exhibits of various plantation equipment.
These galleries include the geography room that explains how the
island's geography and weather patterns would influence the growth
and development of the sugar business, providing information about
the elaborate irrigation system and network of deep wells that had
to be developed and discovered by the plantations. The water room
showcases how the water would be transported from the windward
slopes to the sunny isthmus and the brave men that made it happen.
The human resources room houses all the pertinent historical data
about the pioneers that helped start and continue the business, as
well as many relics, documents and photos with labor contracts
written in Hawaiian, Japanese and Chinese and highlighting the
arrival of immigrant plantation workers that came here from across
the globe. The plantation room houses many photos and outstanding
exhibits that show the marvelous multi-ethnic background of the
plantation's communities and life on them, with many religious
relics, household relics and a scale model of a worker's camp house.
Next is the field work room that shows the workers in the fields,
using various equipment like surveying equipment, a cane knife, and
other items like a kau kau tin that translates into lunch pail; with
a mannequin wearing a typical women's work garb from the fields. And
finally, the mill room that includes numerous interactive displays
like a 1915 locomotive bell, a working scale model of cane-crushing
machinery and a Cuban sugar mill, with outstanding narrative and
added lighting and sound effects. The outdoor exhibits include some
very strange looking equipment like the Cleveland Model J36 trench
digger, a cane hauler, vintage Caterpillar tractors, an outdoor
Portuguese oven that had been constructed in the 1920s, a bull gear
that is about 11 feet in diameter and a cane grab that is big enough
for a child to walk under without bending over. They do have a very
historical fully restored locomotive that is considered too valuable
to set outside, until it can get some type of protective coating or
covering.
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