Benjamin Pitman (Hawaii)

Life

Benjamin Pitman born October 12, 1815 in Salem, Massachusetts. His father was Benjamin Cox Pitman (1790–1845) and mother was Sally Richardson (1789–1858). He had two sisters: Sally (died 1822) and Mary Elizabeth (died 1825).

His father Benjamin Cox Pitman came to the Hawaiian islands on trading missions with Stephen Reynolds in 1826 and 1828. He brought his son in 1833 and settled in Hilo, Hawaii. About a year later, the younger Pitman married Chiefess Kinoʻole o Liliha, who controlled vast lands under King Kamehameha III. On September 11, 1845 his father died and was buried in the new Oahu Cemetery.

Around 1846 he opened a small thatched hut with only a mat over a floor of bare earth at the rim of Kilauea volcano called Volcano House. He charged $1 a day, but eventually gave up the remote site. He opened a store in Hilo (called a ship chandler) to supply whaling ships. As the whaling business grew, so did his fortunes. He started added "Esq." at the end of his name and acted as district magistrate, but there is no record of his being educated in law. In 1849 a visitor described him as the major businessman in town.

By 1852 he was growing coffee, arrowroot, sugarcane, and served as vice president of the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society. He employed Chinese laborors on his sugarcane plantation. Pitman served as customers collector and first postmaster on the island of Hawaii. In 1854, after the Hilo Boarding School and Church started by Sarah Joiner and David Belden Lyman burned down, he raised funds to rebuild it.

Their children were Mary Pitman Ailau (1838/41–1905), Henry Hoʻolulu Pitman (1845–1863), and Benjamin Keolaokalani Franklin Pitman (1852–1918). His first wife Kinoʻole died in 1855.

He married for a second time on August 5, 1856 on Oahu. Maria Louisa Walsworth was born in Cleveland, Ohio, May 20, 1822, married Rev. Henry Kinney, and had come in 1848 as missionary to the island. When Henry's health failed, they traveled to California, where Henry died in 1854. Maria moved back and married Pitman, but this second wife died on March 6, 1858 in Hilo. Daughter Maria Kinoʻole Pitman (1858–1905) married Fred Mory of Chicago in 1881. His third wife was Martha Ball Pitman (1824–1902) with whom he had two sons Charles Brooks Pitman (1860–1918) and Harold Albert Pitman (1865–1948).

When his business partner Reynolds died in 1859, Pitman became sole owner of the plantations, and built a house in Honolulu. About two years later, he sold his Hilo residence, which Pitman build at Niopola in 1840, and the sugarcane plantation at Amauulu (Puueo) to Thomas Spencer, and moved back to Boston so the children could attend school there. The Spencer House as it became called was later converted into the Hilo Hotel which was torn down in 1956. In January 1868 he founded a "Hawaiian Club" in Boston.

The family met future Queen Liliʻuokalani on her visit to Boston in 1887. (Daughter Mary Pitman Ailau had been a bridesmaid of the Princess.) He died in January 17, 1888 at Somerville, Massachusetts. Pitman was buried in a family plot in the Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Henry Hoʻolulu served in the American Civil War as a private in the 22nd Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He was captured, and died on February 27, 1863.

Benjamin K. F. Pitman married Almira Hollander (1854–1939) in 1875 and became a partner in his father-in-law's law firm L. P. Hollander & Co. Myra became active in the movement for Women's suffrage in the United States, and returned to visit Hawaii in 1917. Their son Benjamin attended Harvard College, and their other son Theodore Pitman became a sculptor, dedicating a monument to his ancestors in 1928. Another Theodore, their great-grandson, donated a valuable manuscript of notes from 1836 to 1861 to the Bishop Museum in 2007.