The Otholt family raised livestock and grew their own vegetables. Their main crop was cabbage since they made their own sauerkraut. They also made their own cheese and butter, and sometimes they sold their cheese and butter products to the plantation manager.
(click image to enlarge)
The family is found in the 1900 Census of the Hawaiian
Islands on lines 1-6 (see image above). At this point, the Otholt’s have been at Koloa Plantation
for 17 years and Johann is now a plantation overseer. His oldest son, at the
age of 16, is working as a plantation laborer while his three younger sons are
still in school. Johann and Lena both still spoke their native German (and very
like a very broken “Pidgin English”) while their oldest son was fluent in
English and Hawaiian (and probably German, as well). They are renting a kuleana.
(Kuleana, by definition, means responsibility. Kuleana in this sense meant a
parcel of land where you have the right to use it to grow food and other
resources and a responsibility to take care of the land. It is a concept used
by the ancient Hawaiians, as they did not believe in land ownership.)
(click image to enlarge)
The family is also found in the
1910 Census of Hawaii living on what appears to be Koloa Landing Road. The census
lists them under their English names. Johann (found as John) is now 72 years
old. He retired/stopped working some time in 1909 as the census asks if he was
out of work on April 15, 1910 (he answered “yes”) and the number of weeks he
had been out of work in 1909 (he answered “48”). His wife, Lena (Helen), is now
52. Gerhardt is 26 and married to his wife Annie (Anna Helene Bremer) and they
have a son named Charlie, who is 5 months old. They all live with Johann and
Lena and the other boys: Johann (found as John), Carl (found as Charlie), and
Heinrich (found as Henry). While Johann is no longer working, his sons have all
secured employment at the Koloa Sugar Plantation. Gerhardt and Carl are both engineers
on the plantation locomotive Paulo, Johann
is a machinist at the sugar mill, and Heinrich is a helper at the sugar mill.
At some time after the 1910 census was completed, our ancestor Johann Otholt died in Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii. His granddaughter, Alice Otholt Horii, says, “Johann was buried in Koloa Cemetery, near the river. The river flooded one year and washed a number of graves away.” Johann’s grave may have been one of the graves lost in the flood.
His widow and grown sons
eventually moved to the island of O’ahu, where they continued the story of our
Otholt family.
Koloa Sugar Mill in modern times (photo from Kauai Historical Society)
Descriptions of Early Plantation Life by Various Immigrants:
The German children at Kōloa, who went to the government
school there, had to hoe in the fields before and after school, that is from
five to eight in the morning and from two to five in the afternoon. For this
they received ten cents a day. Our lunas (overseers) were usually Hawaiians. They would
assign a certain number of rows to be hoed each day to each laborer. If these
were not finished he received half pay for that days work at the end of the
month. The assignment was called ukapau, meaning contract. Our work when we
first came was to how up weed in the fields and to strip leaves from the sugar
cane. This was considered easy work by the bosses, but he who for ten hours a
day must stand with bent back longs at night for rest.
They did not leave us much time to straighten our back.
Immediately they called us “lazy fellow”! And the leaves cut our hands to that
we could hardly stand it, as we weren’t used to that kind of work.
The German women who worked in the fields did not dress as
queerly as the Japanese women do now.
For many years my husband was a common laborer. He had to
clear the land of rocks.
At Kōloa everything was very expensive, so that we hardy
patronized the store. Nothing could be bought for less than 25 cents. For our
meals we had mainly homemade bread and black coffee. The bread, which we baked
of the flour given us regularly, turned out very hard and sweet. We had to eat
it dry, unless we had some lard. There was no milk, even for the children.
Once, when my son was sick, I had to walk a great distance and pay a large
amount for just a little milk. After a while we had sweet potatoes, and at
Lihue we could get everything.
A big bag of taro cost only 25 cents. The mango trees bore
large fruit untouched by the flies. Anyone was allowed to kill cattle in the
uplands, provided he deposited the hides. Bought meat cost $1 for 20 pounds.
At Kōloa, life was uncivilized. The roads were nothing but
mud. Walking along them was almost impossible, as we sank down to our knees.
There was no semblance of religion. If a person died, his body was taken to a
graveyard in a canefield away from the road and buried. No, there was not even
a Lord’s Prayer repeated.
There was not a single buggy on the whole island. There was
no justice for us laborers in the early days at Kōloa. Our overseer was not
much beloved. The laws of Hawaii and the attitude of the Hawaiian judges and
officials, who danced to the tune of the plantation bosses, were our undoing.
On one occasion I had not finished my assigned number of rows, not because I
was lazy, but because too much had been given me to hoe and because I always
took enough time to do my work carefully. At the end of the month my overseer
refused to pay me a full wage or that day’s work. I thereupon went to court.
The judge was a Hawaiian and my overseer acted as interpreter. The final result
was that I had to pay a fine of $8. But only in our part of Kōloa were there
serious complaints. We were known as the penal colony. The trouble with the
Germans at Kōloa was that they were all trained in trades. We had, for
instance, 8 shoemakers, including one who was really an expert. These artisans
did not want to work as plain plantation laborers. They tried to evade their
contracts by using such silly excuses as that their roofs were leaking.
When my son had worked but a few months for the plantation,
he came to me one day and asked me to pack up his things. He said he could
stand it no longer. He wanted to get out. He left for Honolulu where he worked
himself up to a responsible position in a well-known firm. When children left
the plantation in that way, the parents were severely reprimanded and often
told to go too.
By hard work and through the cooperation of every member of
the family it was possible to save. During vacations the children earned a
little extra money by working in the fields. The women were most ingenious in
finding ways of increasing the family income. They soon discovered easier ways
than working in the fields. They took in laundry, they went out to clean rooms
or to sew, they acted as midwives and nurses, they rented out their horses and
their buggies, they took in boarders, took care of and raised children, sold
eggs, butter, milk, vegetables, and taro. One woman managed to do the washing
for 21 people, to clean several rooms, act as midwife, rent out the horse and
buggy. Another woman took in washing from bachelors and the part-Hawaiian
judges. She earned $30 a month. With her first savings she bought a horse. The
saddle and bridle she bought on credit. They cost her next months’ earnings
from washing. She surprised her husband one morning with the horse. She also
took in boarders at $9 a month. Sometimes she had so much housework to do that
she stayed up till 3:30, half an hour before rising time. “But,” she stated, “I
was never tired.”
Note: The above descriptions are from a book of family history prepared by George Crosson and his wife, Juliette Otholt, for their children. There are no sources listed for these accounts.
Map of Koloa on the island of Kaua'i. (Photo from Kauai-Beaches.com)
Wikipedia: Old Sugar Mill of Koloa
The Story of Kaua'i
Koloa: An Oral History of a Kaua‘i Community
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