Trash, furniture and sleeping materials were found in the King Street Cemetery in September 2020 during the depths of COVID. (Photo courtesy Deacon Keith Cabiles)
Littering, a fire and other damage are recent issues at the King Street Catholic graveyard
By Anna Weaver
Hawaii Catholic Herald
A headstone marks the grave of the first mayor of Honolulu, Joseph H. Fern. (Photo courtesy Deacon Keith Cabiles)
After ongoing issues with trespassers including a recent fire, the Diocese of Honolulu is looking for solutions to allow its historic Catholic cemetery in downtown Honolulu to remain open for visitors.
King Street Cemetery is the resting place for many of Hawaii’s early Catholics including its first four bishops and many Sacred Hearts priests, brothers and sisters who helped establish and spread the faith in the islands in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th century.
“This is a link to our history,” said Deacon Keith Cabiles, the Diocese of Honolulu’s chancellor and archivist.
“If anybody just walks through there, it’s such a beautiful place. I spent an hour on Memorial Day weekend just taking photos and that wasn’t even a fourth of the whole cemetery.”
However, in recent years, there’s been an increased amount of littering, trespassing and squatting inside the cemetery’s boundaries.
Deacon Cabiles reports that trash, bottles of urine, feces, and other unwelcome items are being left on the graves.
There have been tents and even couches brought in and beds laid out within grave marker lines. A couple of years ago, after neighbors at the adjacent One Archer Lane and Royal Court condominiums reported seeing people using their own spigots to access the water system in the cemetery, Deacon Cabiles had the water turned off. That stopped much of the trespassing for a while.
However, a particular man has been setting up camp in the cemetery since around 2019. While he disappeared for a while, he returned this spring. Despite the offer of support services and resources, being asked to leave and visits with the police, he kept coming back. Eventually, he was cited and arrested for trespassing.
Security guards
Someone else started a recent fire under a dried tree while trying to cook, said Deacon Cabiles. It was put out before spreading but could have been disastrous for the cemetery and nearby properties.
The diocese has resorted to hiring a security guard to keep any trespassers out and keeping the cemetery locked most days except Wednesdays when a diocese-hired landscape crew works there. The cemetery was also open over most of the Memorial Day weekend’s daylight hours.
King Street Cemetery on May 28, 2022. (Photo courtesy Deacon Keith Cabiles)
Deacon Cabiles said that keeping the cemetery locked is not what the diocese wants as a long-term solution.
“We have this issue that prevents us from opening the cemetery,” he said. “And people really want the cemetery open, especially now that COVID is waning down,” he said. “We’ve been getting so many calls that people want the cemetery open to visit their families.”
The security guard is a costly but effective solution at the moment, Deacon Cabiles said. But general upkeep of the cemetery has been an ongoing issue.
Before an early 1980s fire, there was an onsite caretaker. State records show there was a nonprofit King Street Cemetery Preservation Society registered from 1989 until 2000. However, there is no “friends of the cemetery” type of group today.
“My idea was to generate interest in the cemetery because it’s such a beautiful, peaceful place. And the history is just amazing,” the deacon said.
“Especially coming out of COVID, the more people are able to go in there, the homeless people will see lots of activity and that it’s probably not worth it for them to loiter.”
Deacon Cabiles would love to get volunteers to help with beautification projects for the King Street cemetery. Long-term ideas for increasing activity there might include history tours or onsite docents to answer questions, and prayer services.
If you’re interested in joining a “Friends of King Street Cemetery” group to help beautify the cemetery and create a steady presence of volunteers, you can contact Deacon Cabiles at kcabiles@rcchawaii.org or 808-203-6715.
Bishops and lay people: The history of the King Street Cemetery
Diocesan records note that the original land for the cemetery was likely given to the Catholic Church in Hawaii around 1845 by Royal Governor Boki or Chiefess Lydia Kamakee Piikoi, who controlled the Kewalo area at the time. More land was added to the cemetery, with an 1866 purchase from Manuel Paiko and a purchase around 1912 from W.C. Achi.
When it first opened, the cemetery was outside Honolulu in a dry plain area called Kulaokahua, between Alapai Street and the Punahou area. The city gradually grew up around it.
Concerns about overcrowding and improperly regulated burials at existing cemeteries on Oahu, including at the Catholic cemetery on King Street, came up in an 1888 Board of Health report along with calls for new cemeteries, which continued in reports dating through 1905.
June 1908 Hawaiian Gazette and Pacific Commercial Advertiser newspaper articles reported that the Board of Health declared a lower sloping part of the King Street Cemetery to be unsanitary because of the high water level underground. Burials were to stop within three months.
However, according to newspaper records, burials continued at the cemetery into at least the rest of the 1910s. FindAGrave.com shows burials dating through 1930. There were just a few burials after that in the 1940s, for the wives of Robert Wilcox, a part-Hawaiian revolutionary and politician, and Honolulu’s first mayor Joseph Fern, both of whom were already buried in the cemetery, Bishop Stephen Alencastre and the relative of a woman already interred there.
Fire kills caretaker, destroys records
A newspaper clipping shows the burial of a Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace usher.
During the widening of King Street in November 1971, 39 sets of remains from the graveyard were relocated to other Oahu cemeteries.
A fire in the cemetery in 1980 or 1981 killed the caretaker who lived at a home on the property and destroyed existing cemetery records. After the fire, the church wasn’t allowed to construct another caretaker building.
As part of the development of One Archer Lane next door in the mid-90s, the building developer, the Myers Corporation, paid for the development rights or “air space” over the cemetery in exchange for eight units on the 10th floor of the new residential building. Retired priests now live in those units.
The headstone of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Peace usher, Peter Kamalii, today. (Photo courtesy: Deacon Keith Cabiles)
The Myers Corporation also covered the cost of restoring the cemetery wall, fencing and gate on King Street.
A large iron cross in the cemetery was erected in honor of an active early missionary priest, Sacred Hearts Father Arsenius Walsh, according to a biography of the priest written for the Herald by Father Louis Yim. However, Father Walsh’s body was eventually moved into a common plot in the cemetery with other Sacred Hearts order members.
Four early Hawaii Catholic bishops are buried in the cemetery at the foot of the iron cross. They are Bishop Herman Koeckemann, Bishop Gulstan Ropert, Bishop Libert Hubert Boeynaems, and Bishop Alencastre.
Hawaii’s first “vicar apostolic,” as bishops of Hawaii were officially known before there was a Diocese of Honolulu, Bishop Stephen Rouchouze, was lost at sea on a return trip to the islands in 1843. The second vicar apostolic, Bishop Louis Maigret, is buried in the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace’s crypt, as is Bishop John J. Scanlan, the second bishop of the Diocese of Honolulu.
Other standouts buried in the cemetery: Princess Eugenie Ninito Sumner of Tahiti; Manuel Nunes, who introduced the ukulele to Hawaii; and Maria Kamila, the daughter of Don Francisco De Paula Marin, a Spanish horticulturist in early 19th century Hawaii who introduced a number of plants and fruits to the islands.
Many Portuguese Catholics are buried in the cemetery as they made up many of Oahu’s Catholics in the late 1800s to early 1900s.
