Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives

The first missionary company arrived in Honolulu in 1820 with more than books and religious instruction. Their supplies included the timbers of a house fitted in Boston and shipped around Cape Horn. The frame was unloaded in January 1821 and, after permission was secured from the aliʻi, assembled on land in the capital. That Mission House still stands, part of a site that preserves the physical spaces of a complicated encounter.

The museum’s three historic buildings reflect different stages of that encounter. The 1821 Mission House is Hawaiʻi’s oldest Western-style house; the Chamberlain House followed in 1831, and a bedroom annex in 1841. The site also interprets the printing work through which missionaries and Hawaiian collaborators produced material in the Hawaiian language. The archive now holds one of the world’s largest collections of Hawaiian-language printed works.