HCH photos by Anna Weaver

Natives and foreigners, commoners and nobility, laity and bishops share the soil at the

King Street Catholic Cemetery

By Father Louis Yim | Special to the Herald

On All Souls Day, Nov. 2, 1841, Sacred Hearts Brother Calixte Lacomte at the Catholic mission in Honolulu wrote in his journal: “Father (Dositheus) Desvault went to the cemetery to offer a Mass to the deceased.”

The cemetery Brother Calixte was writing about was on the outskirt of town on “the road to Waikiki” where “Catholic defuncts had been buried … from the first times of the mission.” In Honolulu today this graveyard is there on King Street, between Ward Avenue and Archer Lane, and known by most as the King Street Cemetery.

In those early times, Hawaiians who were baptized Catholics were given a Christian burial and almost everything else. Sacred Hearts Father Valentin Franks, writing in The Catholic Herald on May 3, 1940, tells us: “In those days a funeral was arranged by the Church and with a nominal fee, a plot was provided where the relatives or friends prepared the grave.”

The mission had a hearse available and the church sexton very often “was the undertaker, the driver and the grave digger.”

No monument or gravestone identified many Hawaiian burials and that accounted for the hundreds of “unknowns” who lie beneath the soil there on King Street.

Cemetery lots portioned out by the Catholic mission were usually large enough to accommodate the future burials of family members. That is why we see at King Street families like the Hollingers, the Jarretts, the Buckles and the Stewards clustered together in their own ancestral plots.

All souls welcome

Traditionally, Mass was celebrated at the cemetery annually on All Souls Day as early missionary writings tell us. A chapel may have existed on the premises in those early days.

In its beginning years, the cemetery serviced Hawaiian Catholics almost exclusively. Then, from the mid-19th century on, graves included a growing number of Honolulu’s haole residents. In the 1870s, with the influx of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, the cemetery became their final resting place as the gravestones bearing pioneering Portuguese names indicate.

The grounds also hold the remains of a long list of the early Catholic missionaries: priests, brothers, sisters and bishops, all members of the French religious Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

The cemetery was officially closed in 1927 when it ran out of burial space.

The late Honolulu Advertiser columnist Bob Krauss wrote this description in his newspaper on Oct. 22, 2000: “It’s a quiet place, the little Catholic cemetery only a few blocks away from bustling downtown Honolulu, peacefully asleep while traffic zips by King Street.”

Krauss portrayed the community of the deceased as a mixed bag: “Lots of Latinos. Antone Cunha came from the Azores, Franklyn Benavetz from St. Michaels, Luciano Machado from Mexico City, Philip Milton from Valparaiso, Chile. … Emile de Horne of Belgium and F.A. Wood of Jackson, Miss. … and the consuls of France and Portugal are in competition for the tallest and elaborately carved Celtic crosses.”

Famous occupants

Some who lie there were well known in 19th century Hawaii. Isaac Montgomery, for instance. He is at rest along side his wife Fanny and son Daniel in their conspicuous mausoleum immediate to the left of the cemetery entrance. Isaac was an enterprising young Irishman when he arrived in Hawaii in the late 1830s. Soon afterward, he married the daughter of Nathan Winship, an American sea captain in the sandalwood trade with Kamehameha I.

Montgomery quickly became a prosperous Honolulu merchant dealing a wide range of items for the island people. He hired as a store clerk a young American, providing him with a small salary and room and board. The man worked for awhile before leaving for the United States. His name was Herman Melville who later wrote the classic novel “Moby Dick.” The Montgomerys were Catholics and when Isaac passed away on May 16, 1870, one historian commented: “He bequeathed a fortune of $20,000 to $30,000 to the Catholic Church” in Hawaii.

Certainly the most notable occupant of the King Street Cemetery is a local boy from Maui named Robert W. Wilcox, a part-Hawaiian with a royal Maui lineage. In 1880 he was sent to Italy by King Kalakaua to attend the Royal Military Academy in Turin. Upon his return to Hawaii in 1888, Wilcox, a rebel with a cause, joined two sensational revolts organized to stem the tide of a diminishing Hawaiian monarchy. Both adventures, one dealing with Kalakaua in 1889 and the other with Liliuokalani in 1895, were carried out in military fashion with Wilcox donning his military cadet uniform. Both ended in utter failure.

A bronze statue of Robert W. Wilcox stands tall in downtown Honolulu where the Fort Street Mall runs into King Street. It was erected in 1993, the centennial year of the overthrow of Liliuokalani as Hawaii’s last reigning monarch. Today native Hawaiian activists look up at this rebel in admiration and indeed for inspiration.

Wilcox was baptized a Catholic in Our Lady of Peace Cathedral, two blocks mauka of that statue, in 1900. When he died in 1903, Bishop Libert Boeynaems officiated at his funeral Mass at the cathedral. An impressive Territory-wide procession followed for the burial at the King Street Cemetery.

Today his devoted granddaughter, Mrs. Vickie Hughes, regularly tends his grave with tender, loving aloha. The family recently installed an iron fence around Wilcox’s grave, the same kind of fence that encloses the grounds of Iolani Palace.

Buried religious

Two sections of the cemetery are occupied by early Catholic missionaries. One section, where a lofty iron cross stands, is the burial site of four mission period bishops. The other section, on the “Waikiki” side of the bishops, is an enclosed area where the remains of 24 priests, four reverend mothers, 27 sisters, 13 lay brothers and one subdeacon share a common grave. All have their religious names listed on a large marble block. In the recent past their individual graves had been dug up for this collective reburial.

One historical note about the tall iron cross deserves mentioning. It involved Father Robert Arsenius Walsh. A zealous missionary, Father Walsh introduced the Catholic faith to the island of Hawaii in 1840, to Kauai in 1841, and to Niihau in 1842. In 1859, he was assigned as director to Hawaii’s first Catholic school, Ahuimanu College which was established in 1846 in Kahaluu in Windward Oahu. He remained there until his death on Oct. 14, 1869.

Many admired Father Walsh and following his burial at King Street, they proposed erecting a fitting monument at the site. Hundreds of donations flowed in and Walsh’s good friend Godfrey Rhodes was put in charge of the project. The large iron cross was ordered from the Union Iron Works in San Francisco and, upon its arrival in Honolulu, sometime in 1871, it was presumably installed near Walsh’s grave. But there are no church records giving us details of this taking place. All we know is what we see today: the tall cross standing like a sentinel over four buried bishops. Meanwhile, Father Walsh’s religious name Arsene appears among his missionary companions on the marble stone marking the common grave.

The bishop is missing

Our final comment on the cemetery deals with the mystery of the missing bishop. When Bishop Louis Maigret died on June 11, 1882, the Catholic mission made plans for the funeral service three days later. Covering the event, the newspaper Pacific Commercial Advertiser reported: “The remains of the late Monseigneur … were interred at the Catholic Cemetery in King Street.” Nearly 100 years later, the question was, “Where?”

All inquiries at the cemetery revealed nothing. He was not one of the four bishops placed at the tall cemetery cross, nor was he buried at the common grave of all the missionaries. For a long time, the opinion of church people “in the know” was that Maigret was somewhere in the cathedral! But a physical search of the entire church premise revealed nothing. There was no locked door that had not been opened.

In early 1981, Bishop John J. Scanlan was reviewing construction plans for the new chancery building near the Fort Street Mall. At the same time, some work needed to be done in the cathedral basement just below the sacristy. There, in a small room that served as a wine cellar for the cathedral fathers in earlier days, workers were assigned to remove a hollow-tile wall. When the wall came down, to everyone’s surprise, there was revealed a long-forgotten chamber. In the middle of this small space was a bulky, cemented mound. The long lost Bishop Maigret had been found!

But what about the June 15, 1882, newspaper account of the bishop’s funeral procession to the cemetery? A letter, later uncovered, provided the explanation to the mystery. Brother Victorinus Bertrand, who was stationed at the cathedral at the time, described the funeral in a July 30, 1882, letter to a confrere in Europe: “Hawaiians were carrying the coffin. … For now, it is resting in Mr. Montgomery’s mausoleum, awaiting the construction of the crypt in the church of Honolulu.”

This coming Sunday is All Souls Day. If by chance, you should be passing by the old King Street Cemetery, do pause and reflect for a moment at this hallowed ground. And before rushing on, whisper a quiet prayer: “Let perpetual light shine on them, Lord. May they rest in peace. Amen.”