Native Hawaiians lived along this windward North Shore for centuries before the sugar came. Then in 1880 Samuel Alexander and Henry Baldwin opened the Pāʻia plantation and built the island's first great mill just outside town, channeling water down long flumes to carry the cut cane to the harvest. Immigrant workers arrived from Japan, China, Portugal and the Philippines to cut and haul it, housed in plantation camps that grew into a town. By the 1890s Pāʻia's was among the largest sugar operations in the world, and by the turn of the century the town was Maui's most important North Shore community — more than a fifth of the island's people, plus stores, schools, theaters, hotels and a hospital. The plantation built the town, and the town built a culture.
It found that life in the counterculture. Through the 1960s and 1970s a wave of artists, surfers and free spirits drifted in and claimed the sleepy sugar town as their unofficial capital. The pastel storefronts filled with galleries, boutiques and a now-legendary natural-foods market on Baldwin Avenue; on the one main street, old-school hippies, professional surfers and new-age wanderers brushed shoulders. The vibe turned barefoot and bohemian, a slice of the Summer of Love frozen on a Hawaiian shore. Pāʻia became "the hippest little town on Maui," and the easygoing, salt-tousled feel from those years never left.
Why People Visit Pāʻia
Pāʻia offers a whole mood in one small town: bohemian, barefoot charm, world-class wind and surf, and the romance of the open road to Hāna. It is the coolest little town on Maui — and for the artists, surfers and free spirits who live here, simply home, the place where old Maui still feels like itself.
