Pāʻia is a story of perseverance. A fire in the 1930s swept the town, and on April 1, 1946 one of the largest tsunamis in the islands' history struck Lower Pāʻia. Each time the town rebuilt. When the plantation began to wind down and central Maui grew, many families moved on to Kahului and Wailuku in the 1950s, and Pāʻia settled into a quieter era — smaller, weathered, and waiting for its next life.
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.
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.
