A garden path to understanding
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Jack Gillmar enjoys the solitude he finds at the teahouse on the main trail of the Friendship Garden in Kane'ohe. Gillmar and his wife, Janet, are working to ensure the integrity of the 10-acre garden.
By Eloise Aguiar
Advertiser Windward O'ahu Writer
KANE'OHE — Above the Kokokahi YWCA, tucked away in a small 87-lot subdivision developed in 1927 as Hawai'i's first interracial community, is a garden created for its residents, a place of tranquility and quiet beauty where they could mingle in peace.
The Friendship Garden, with its teahouse, banyan valley, bamboo grove and hiking trails offers visitors a serene mountain experience in the middle of suburban tract homes. Along the trails, hikers are treated to vistas of Kane'ohe and Kailua bays.
Today, few people are aware of the neighborhood's revolutionary origins, but those who know are determined to preserve the 10-acre garden in perpetuity as a piece of Hawai'i history and a monument to a dream: that the races could live together as one.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Robert Midkiff, grandson of the man who founded Kokokahi and chairman of the Atherton Family Foundation, attended music camp there in the 1930s and fondly recalled playing with Chinese, Japanese and Korean children. The kids didn't give much thought to the fact that they were of different races, he said.
Jack Gillmar, president of the Friendship Garden Foundation, begins his hike up the trail of the Friendship Garden, a 72-year-old idyll in Kane'ohe.
"It didn't matter," Midkiff said. "We were all growing up together."
The Friendship Garden declined during the 1950s and '60s until Jack Gillmar, who had spent many days of his youth there, decided along with his wife, Janet, to restore the site. Now, nearly 30 years of effort involving many people are coming to fruition and the final pieces that will help preserve the garden are being put in place.
The property has been deeded to a nonprofit set up by the Gillmars. They are focusing on building an endowment to ensure that it will be cared for many years down the road and plan to have the site listed in the Hawai'i and national historic registries. And, recently, the Friendship Garden Foundation headed by Gillmar received preliminary approval to downzone a portion of the acreage to ensure the integrity of the 72-year-old garden.
When the garden and subdivision was still a dream for its developer, Theodore Richards, most of the people in Hawai'i lived in camps or areas segregated by race, Gillmar said. Richards, who came to Hawai'i to teach in 1889 and became the principal of Kamehameha Schools in 1903, wanted to change that.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Richards marriedr Mary Atherton and, in 1927, purchased 41 acres from Kane'ohe Ranch and built the Kokokahi community, portions of which in the 1950s became the YWCA. Kokokahi had a campground, conference facility, amphitheater, garden and the interracial housing development.
Jack Gillmar is restoring the site he visited as a boy.
The narrow valley was inaccessible by automobile, and Richards used a boat to get to the area from his home in central Kane'ohe, said Midkiff.
Gillmar said Richards built a long pier where people could fish or dive. The water was clear blue, revealing all of the mysteries of the sea, Gillmar said.
"The pier for any kid was really neat because you could walk over the reef and see all the strange things without ruining your feet," he said.
At the end of the pier was a dressing room with a ladder to the roof and a diving board that anyone could use.
"He tried to make it a place where different ethnic groups could meet, get past the social divisions that existed in the '20s and '30s," Gillmar said, adding that it was the first attempt in Hawai'i to mix the races.
The times were ripe for that kind of an effort, he said. Even the Honolulu Academy of Arts, which opened in 1927 as the Honolulu Museum of Arts, had as one of its goals to bring the different cultures, traditions and arts together under one roof, he said.
Kokokahi became a popular youth camp, where different churches planned activities and retreats, Gillmar said.
"One thing they discovered when they were working with the young people was that they needed to get them together; they needed to break them out of their isolation," he said.
Several of the lots in the subdivision were sold to churches that built camp facilities for youth groups. The garden was used for hiking and other activities. By 1930, people such as the Rev. Frank Scudder and his youth group, which camped at Kokokahi, planted the first trees in the garden.
Scudder, who was Gillmar's grandfather, dedicated many of the trees to living heroes and heroines of Hawai'i, Gillmar said.
In the mid-1930s, landscape architects Richard Tongg and Francis Bowers provided a plan for the garden, laying out smaller Hawaiian, Chinese and Japanese gardens within the Friendship Garden, he said. Doshisha University donated a stone basin in 1936 to commemorate Friend Peace Scholarships that were set up by Richards for Japanese to study in America.
Later, Japanese Americans used the scholarships to study in Japan.
The garden and campgrounds fell out of use during World War II and began deteriorating in the 1950s and 1960s.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Daisy Payton, president of the Kokokahi Community Association and an area resident for 40 years, said the garden was very beautiful but people stole and destroyed many of the plants over the years.
Lush landscaping at the entrance to the Friendship Garden welcomes visitors to the valley that is out of the way of most O'ahu residents.
In 1973, Gillmar and his wife, Janet, took out a 50-year lease for the garden, at $1 a year, with a promise to restore it and set up a nonprofit to care for it. In return, the garden would be deeded to the nonprofit. That was done in 1998.
Since leasing the gardens the Gillmars have spent $100,000 making improvements such as repairing the teahouse, creating a nice entry and building a tool shed. Others have contributed their time, money and talents to ensure the garden's existence, making repairs and building trails.
Midkiff and Jim Richards, another grandson of Theodore Richards, lobbied to secure the property for the foundation. The Atherton and Cooke foundations have contributed thousands of dollars to the foundation. Russell Porter, a Kokokahi resident, repaired the trails and Ted Talbott, a Kane'ohe accountant, built a new one.
The garden foundation is now raising money to set up a $50,000 endowment to care for the property, and the zoning change will assure donors that the park will remain intact, Gillmar said. The Atherton Foundation has donated $25,000 to the fund.
Gillmar said the zoning change, to conservation land, will prevent any selloff of the property. The zoning change was approved this month by the City Planning Commission and will now go before the City Council.
Payton said it is important to preserve the historical site for this area where a heritage of tolerance and aloha lives on. Nowhere else is there such a close-knit community, she said.
"We all know each other," she said. "It's unusual in this day and age to find a community where everybody knows each other."
And that's just the way Theodore Richards envisioned the area 75 years ago, a true melting pot. It is emphasized even in the name he chose and which survives today.
In Hawaiian, Kokokahi means "of one blood."
Reach Eloise Aguiar at eaguiar@honoluluadvertiser.com or 234-5266.
