Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum

Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum Review

"A&B," Maui's largest landowner, was one of the "Big Five" companies that spearheaded the planting, harvesting, and processing of sugarcane. At this museum, historic photos, artifacts, and documents explain the introduction of sugarcane to Hawaii and how plantation managers brought in laborers from other countries, changing the Islands' ethnic mix. Exhibits also describe the sugar-making process. Although Hawaiian cane sugar is now being supplanted by cheaper foreign versions—as well as by sugar derived from inexpensive sugar beets—the crop was for many years the mainstay of the Hawaiian economy. You can find the museum in a small, restored plantation manager's house across the street from the post office and the still-operating sugar refinery (smoke billows up when cane is burning).