Auction picks over Lihu'e Mill bones
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser KauaÎi Bureau
LIHU'E, Kaua'i — Strangers walked the sticky catwalks of the old Lihu'e Mill yesterday, smelling the molasses and probing dark corners for mechanical treasures.
Jan TenBruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
A handful of remaining plantation employees stood at their stations, clearly feeling the discomfort as the bone-pickers wandered through.
The Amfac insignia on this Claas harvester will be replaced with another name after tomorrow's mill auction.
The Lihu'e Plantation Co. stopped grinding cane last year, and its equipment is being auctioned off tomorrow. The mechanical assets of sister company Kekaha Sugar are being sold at the same time.
Veteran plantation employee William A. Farias Sr., 58, sat at a picnic table in the mill electrical shop, directing potential buyers and letting the loss of the plantation seep in.
"My family has worked in this mill for three generations," Farias said.
He was a trainee at Amfac's Pioneer Mill on Maui, which has closed. He spent 24 of his 27 years with Amfac as the Lihu'e Mill's boiling house superintendent. He was also factory manager at Kekaha Sugar. Each of the three plantations where he spent his entire working life has closed.
His father, William Farias, now 79, was a mechanic and preventive maintenance supervisor here, and also ran the Kaua'i Sugar Storage plant at Nawiliwili. His grandfather, Olin Farias, who arrived in Hawai'i from Portugal at age 3, was locomotive overseer in the caneyard in the days when trains brought the cane to the mill.
Jan TenBruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
Farias will continue working for the plantation until next month. Meanwhile, he has a security guard position at the airport and has job applications out.
William Farias has a lot of family history left at the Lihu'e mill site.
There is a lot of his kind of family history here, as there is at any of the Hawai'i sugar and pineapple plantations that have closed with the waning of big plantation agriculture in the Islands.
The loss of the Lihu'e Mill will remove a piece of the heart from Lihu', a town built to support the mill. It also will remove from the larger community the biggest and oldest sugar mill on the island.
Lihu'e Mill not only was a factory but an industrial city, with its own carpenters, welding, machine and electrical shops, a power plant and two complete working sugar mills.
On an isolated island, far from Honolulu, this was never a factory that could count on support from surrounding shops in the community. It always provided virtually all of its own fabrication, maintenance and repair services.
To walk through the mill is to walk through a kind of time warp. Much of the equipment is decades old, although still working fine.
Yesterday, there was still powdery sugar cane residue in the workings of the old mill that is run by a Corliss steam engine. There was grease on the bearings. You could smell the sweetness around the old molasses tanks. Dust sat thick on unused equipment in the machine shop.
Jan TenBruggencate • The Honolulu Advertiser
A few carpenters were ripping massive beams in the carpenter shop, beams so big that it took three men to push and pull them through a powerful Delta table saw, whose frame is a thick chunk of cast iron.
Cane haul trucks at Lihu'e Plantation are numbered for tomorrow's auction. Yesterday, workers watched "bone-pickers" look for bargains.
Three men stood around a metal lathe, whose spindle was spinning slowly as the men chatted idly.
"Some people like to blame us. We tell them this company went under before we came along," said Bruce Baird, director of auctions for Dovebid, the company that tomorrow will sell off most of the movable assets at an auction that is expected to take 10 to 12 hours. There are 1,468 items to sell.
The auction starts at 10 a.m. at the Radisson Kaua'i Beach Resort.
Parts of this mill are a century old, but it will be sold using the most modern technology. There are at least 70 potential bidders signed up who will follow the auction in real time over the Internet, Baird said.
The company's rolling stock — the tractors, harvesters, forklifts and trailers, some on rubber tires and some on tracks — is likely to bring the most money, Baird said.
But he said one of the hottest items — if not in price, then in the amount of interest it has generated — is the old business office clock from Kekaha Sugar. It's the last item on the auction list, an old IBM wall clock in a wooden case.
It is one of the few items that probably will be sold less for its present-day usefulness than for its history and tradition.
