In April 1937, in a historic event for the Kaupo community, the road from Kaupo eastward to Kipahulu opened. For the first time, motorists could drive their vehicles to and from Kaupo, traversing the Hana Belt Road across northeastern Maui. In 1951, the road from Kaupo westward to Ulupalakua opened, allowing drivers to complete a circuit around Haleakala.
But although there was no way to drive a car into Kaupo before 1937, a number of autos rambled around the isolated community in the 1920s and early 1930s.
How they ended up there is quite remarkable.
Nick Soon, who ran Kaupo Store, was first to own a vehicle. Soon was a resourceful man, a problem-solver. He assembled radios, repaired watches and installed electricity-generating windmills. Faced with the challenge of getting an auto to a town without a connecting road, his natural solution was to collect parts and build it by hand.
Mary Young Soon, a daughter-in-law of Soon, described the creation of this unique vehicle:
“Nick Soon was fascinated by the early automobiles and longed to own one, but there was no way he could buy one and have it delivered to Kaupo. He took a correspondence course in auto mechanics, ordered parts from eight different companies on the mainland, and built the first automobile in Kaupo—a truck—in 1923.”
This simple Ford Model TT truck immediately became a centerpiece of the community—and generated income for Soon as well. In June 1923, Kaupo's teachers rented the truck for the funeral procession of 16-year-old student Robert Piimauna. Piimauna's parents were deeply affected by this act, as they expressed in an obituary in Nupepa Kuokoa:
No olua kekahi hoomaikai palena ole e na makuahine o ka home imi naauao o ka maua keiki, Mrs. Lily Marciel ame Mrs. Emma Kalohelani. Ua hoopa mai olua i ko maua puuwai, ma o ka hoomaha ana o ke kula no elua la, me ka olua lawe hou ana ae i ke ko’iko’i ma ka hoolimalima ana i ke kaa kalaka o Nicholas Soon no ka lawe ana mai i na boke pua i hele a piha ke kaa ame kekahi mau haumana, a pela pu hoi me olua e ka’i pu ana i ke alanui me na bo-ke pua i ka lima o kela ame keia haumana. Ua noho au i keia aina he 20 makahiki a oi, aole au i ike i kekahi mau hoohiwahiwa elike me keia.
[Our eternal thanks as well to you, Mrs. Lily Marciel and Mrs. Emma Kalohelani, matriarchs of our child’s home for education. You touched our hearts by suspending school for two days as well as for undertaking to rent Nicholas Soon's truck to fill with bouquets and students, driving along the road with bouquets in the hands of every student. I have lived in this area for over 20 years and have never seen anything as exquisite as that.]
Ever industrious, Soon assembled another vehicle before long, a Ford Model T touring car completed in 1926. In addition to mainland suppliers, Kahului Store was another source for parts, as was Valley Isle Motors, which opened in Wailuku in 1923.
Apart from Soon, a few others in the community were also able to acquire vehicles. Lacking Soon's mechanical aptitude, they instead turned to steamships to deliver fully built cars. But landing autos on Kaupo's rugged shoreline required its own level of ingenuity.
The craggy terrain of Mokulau Landing, where steamers regularly delivered cargo, ruled out that location for bringing a vehicle ashore. Instead, the auto would be moved from the steamer onto planks straddling two smaller boats and rowed ashore to the rocky beach near Huialoha Church.
Joseph Marciel and his wife, Josephine, were the first to have a car shipped to Kaupo. Daughter Mina Atai was too young to remember her parents' car being brought in but witnessed a later vehicle landing:
“The boat didn’t come in the harbor [Mokulau Landing]. The boat came, anchor outside, and on the small boat… they put two of these small boats with the planks across, and they put this car, and they took ‘um. Do you know where Mokulau Church is? The landing is way over here by the pali side. But Mokulau Church is over there, where you go down to ʻiliʻili [pebbles]. And so the boat came in as far as can go, and then the people just dragged this car on shore.”
Atai went on to describe these lucky few owners and how they used their cars:
“At Kaupo, we had our own car road, our side. From up our house [in Kahualau Valley] it went down, about three miles of road. There were about four Model-Ts. We had one, the store had one, my uncle had one, and the Smith family had one. We had these Model-Ts, we went store, we went church, only in this place."
The uncle above refers to Antone Marciel Jr., whose wife, Lily, was the teacher who rented Soon's truck for the funeral in 1923.
With limited internal roads and few places to drive to (a main destination being church), clearly these early vehicles were more status symbols than workhorses.
Further hampering the usefulness of these cars, the four cylinder, 20-horsepower engine of the Model T proved no match for the Kaupo mountainside. Ivy Doke, a younger sister of Atai, recalled resorting to manpower when horsepower failed:
“The only time we used [the car] is when we’d go to church on Sundays. Then before we would come up this hill right down here [below the family house], we all jumped out. Mina would drive the car, Dad would sit in the front seat, Mom had to get out and all us kids get out and push the car up the hill.”
Coming full circle, the last person to have a vehicle shipped to Kaupo was Nick Soon, just over a decade after he built the town's first auto. In 1934, Soon had a Ford Model BB delivered, with a stronger engine better suited to the terrain.
In April 1937, Soon used his new truck to celebrate the opening of the Kaupo road, driving the inaugural trip to Kipahulu with 15 schoolchildren aboard.
Not long after, a Valley Isle Motors employee drove Soon's Model BB from Kaupo to the dealership for the truck's first service. Evidently, the vehicle had stood up well in Kaupo. After driving the truck through the winding cliffs of the Hana Belt Road, the employee said he saw no reason for taking the truck in, adding, “She’s got plenty of power”.
Sources: Mary Young Soon's recollections came from the book "Chinese Pioneer Families of Maui, Molokai, and Lanai". The report "Wai O Ke Ola: He Wahi Mo‘olelo No Maui Hikina, Volume II" provided information from Mina Atai. Newspaper articles included the Maui News (April 28, 1937) and Nupepa Kuokoa (December 20, 1923). Ivy Doke shared her memories in a personal interview July 11, 2010, at her parents' home in Kaupo. The photo of Nick Soon's 1923 truck appeared in an article by Rose Soon (Nick's daughter) entitled "Kaupo: A Landing Place of Canoes at Night". The original publication is unknown; the Marciel family has a photocopy. The photos of Lui Smith and the Marciel vehicle were obtained from Mina Atai's photo albums. The image of Nick Soon's 1934 truck appeared in the Maui News article mentioned above.
