Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum

Lonely Planet review

Pu'unene's main attraction is the Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum, an intriguing little collection in the former home of the mill's superintendent. Exhibits give the skinny on the sugarcane biz and include a working scale model of a cane-crushing plant.

Most interesting, however, are the images of people. The museum traces how Samuel Alexander and Henry Baldwin gobbled up vast chunks of Maui land, how they fought tooth and nail with an ambitious Claus Spreckels to gain access to Upcountry water, and how they dug the extensive irrigation systems that made large-scale plantations viable. Representing the other end of the scale is a turn-of-the-20th-century labor contract from the Japanese Emigration Company stating that the laborer shall be paid US$15 a month for working the fields 10 hours a day, 26 days a month.