Henry Perrine Baldwin High School - Wailuku, HI
Posted by: 
silverquill
N 20° 53.414 W 156° 29.459
4Q E 761011 N 2312038
The name Baldwin is well-known on the island of Maui, and the public high school is named for this son of early Christian missionaries to the island.
Waymark Code: WMDXJ2
Location: Hawaii, United States
Date Posted: 03/06/2012
Views: 4
THE PLACE:
The first buildings of the Henry Perrine Baldwin High School were built in 1940 on fifty acres of land in Wailuku. It now has an enrollment of 1,200, with a full academic and athletic program. One of its center pieces as a large bronze sculpture,
Ku Kilakila by Hawaiian artist Joel H.K. Nakila.
THE PERSON:
Henry Perrine Baldwin (1842–1911) was a businessman and politician on Maui in the Hawaiian islands. He supervised the construction of the East Maui Irrigation System and co-founded Alexander & Baldwin, one of the "Big Five" corporations that dominated the economy of the Territory of Hawaii.
Life
Henry Perrine Baldwin was born August 29, 1842 in Lahaina, Hawaii. His father was American Christian missionary Dwight Baldwin (1798–1886), and his mother was Charlotte Fowler Baldwin. He was probably named after American horticulturist Henry Perrine (1797–1840). He attended Punahou School in Honolulu and returned to Maui to become a farmer.
First he tried to manage William DeWitt Alexander's rice plantation, but that failed. Instead by 1863 he went to work for his brother David (also called Dwight Baldwin, Jr) who had started a small sugarcane farm. He hoped to earn enough money to go to medical school, but never left the sugar industry. He took a job as foreman (called ''luna'') of the Waihee plantation, owned by Christopher H. Lewers, under the management of Samuel Thomas Alexander. In 1867 he traveled to the west coast of the United States.
In 1869, Baldwin and Alexander became business partners and bought in the eastern Maui ''ahupuaa'' (ancient land division) called Hamakua Poko. (This is not to be confused with the Hamakua district of Hawaii island.) In 1870 they bought another and planted sugarcane. Baldwin had gone into debt to buy the land.
They lived in an area called "Sunnyside" near the small Paliuli Sugar Mill, which had been built on the edge of Rainbow Gulch by Robert Hind. Alexander managed the larger Haiku mill which had been constructed in 1861 by Castle & Cooke, formed by two former missionaries. Alexander had married Martha Eliza Cooke, daughter of Amos Starr Cooke, a co-founder of Castle & Cooke.
On March 28, 1876 Baldwin lost his right arm in an industrial accident at the Paliuli mill. Trying to adjust the rollers, his fingers got stuck in the cane grinder, pulling in his right arm, and he almost died before it could be turned off and reversed to free him. A worker was sent to get the nearest doctor ten miles (16 km) away to do the amputation. Within weeks he learned to write with his left hand, and continued to play organ in his church with one hand. In a month he was riding horseback in his fields.