Your eyes are on the oldest Western-style buildings anywhere in Hawaii. The first company of New England Congregationalist missionaries arrived in Honolulu harbor on April 19, 1820, having sailed around Cape Horn from Boston. They came carrying not just Bibles but a printing press — and that press would prove as transformative as any sermon.
The Hawaiian language had no written form before the missionaries arrived. Working with Native Hawaiian scholars, the missionaries developed a written Hawaiian alphabet and began translating the Bible and other texts into Hawaiian. The first Hawaiian-language newspaper followed.
Within a generation, Hawaii had one of the highest literacy rates in the world. The wooden Frame House here was prefabricated in New England and shipped around the Horn, arriving in pieces and assembled in 1821. The Coral House and Chamberlain House followed.
These buildings were simultaneously a home, a school, a printing operation, and a center of a cultural transformation that brought both gifts — literacy, medicine — and profound losses, including the erosion of traditional Hawaiian spiritual life that the missionaries considered pagan.