Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum

Wow this place was boring. $ 7 was even too much to spend on this place. The museum is small and apparently is the old superintendent’s house way back in the day. If you are really into history you may be able to spend about 45 minutes in there… otherwise I would recommend bypassing this museum. I gave it 2 stars instead of 1 star because they gave out sugar packets at the end. (Yes the same ones you can get in a restaurant, but they were in a clear bag so it looked more «authentic»!)

Wow, this was boring. I know it’s Maui but wow this place was small and boring. Geez. Glad the tickets werent expensive. I dont know if I would recommend this place unless you were super bored and had no where else to go to kill time.

Small museum but very interesting exhibits about the history of sugar in Maui. Make sure to pick up some Maui sugar in the gift shop. If you don’t want to buy but just try, at the front desk they have little samples!

Sugar Museum,
It is $ 7 per adult to get in. The museum is run by a devoted group of volunteers. The lady in the gift shop we talked to was a nurse in Maui for 40 years and her husband was a doctor. She is retired and working at the museum keeps her out of trouble.
Although small the museum packs a lot of history into its small five room exhibit space. There is a good 10 minute movie about making sugar and a lot of artifacts from the early years of the sugar plantations. Others who reviewed this museum have offered more or better insights into the museum. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t too long or too boring. I got to ring a big bell and it was loud! And I wasn’t yelled at because it says ring me! There was also a very detailed scale model of a sugar plant made by a plant manager while he was imprisoned in WWII in the Philippines.
All in all I got good value for my $ 7 and learned a lot about sugar and about Hawaii.

What invention deep sixed the Hawaiian sugar business? Read on.
We were on our way back from visiting Haleakala crater, and saw this sugar plantation house which had been converted into a sugar museum.
Outside were various pieces of sugar harvesting field machinery, an orange crane on metal treads with a grabbing device for picking up piles of cut sugar cane, a giant green white tractor type truck with tires as tall as a man for pulling truck loads of cut cane, and a tractor for digging trenches, with an endless digger.
The museum has about 4 or 5 rooms, and has a large number of exhibits, pictures and films showing the history of sugar cane in Hawaii from the late 1800s through the 1950s.
Lots of black and whites, under the Alexander and Baldwin sugar company Hawaiian sugar, which became C & H Sugar. Many of the products and captains of the sugar industry are listed.
Also shown are the immigrant workers that these companies exploited. Hawaii imported thousands of Chinese and Japanese workers to toil in the very labor intensive sugar harvesting industry.
One exhibit shows a fully clad Japanese lady immigrant dressed head to toe with protective clothing from the centipedes, scarf to keep out the dust, with long sleeved padded pants and shirts, ready to harvest the sharp spikes of the sugar cane plants, and hat to protect from tropical sun. Very hard labor work under difficult conditions, before mechanization in the 1950s. Not a job many Americans would do today!
No photography allowed inside the building. At the end of the self audio tour they have a gift shop so they can sell you postcards of items you can’t take pictures of.
Expensive sample packets of raw sugar with your admission. $ 7 adults, $ 5 seniors –hey we only have so many good years left-​, $ 2 kids, place closes at 430pm sharp.
You can find this place easily as it is across the street from the only remaining sugar processing plant in Maui, a giant factory with two 10 story tall smoke stacks bellowing tons of smoke and steam into the air, visible for miles from the highway to the airport.
Before the late 1950s, only the limited capacity, 300 mph cruising, 4 engine propeller Lockheed Constellation and Douglas DC-​6s lumbering for 10 hours, could reach the islands from the mainland.
The invention of the high capacity 600 mph cruising 4 engine jet passenger airliner, specifically the Boeing 707, that could fly nonstop from the west coast to Hawaii in 5.5 hours, spelled the beginning of the booming tourist industry in 1959 in Hawaii, and the end of the Hawaiian sugar business.

This was a well done small museum. There are both outdoor and indoor exhibits. Fascinating to learn about all the immigrants who came to work the sugar cane fields and what they endured as progress slowly made their jobs easier.
The gift shop is a gem in itself for Hawaii souvenirs I think. There were some decent deals there — such as handmade woven baskets to hold sugar packets for $ 7. My boyfriend got a t-​shirt for $ 13 or so.

I was disappointed in this little museum. It was $ 7 per an adult and consisted of a self guided tour through a handful of rooms, maybe 5 or 6. It talked a lot about how sugar grows and the two men that founded the mill. However I was hoping to see the sugar cane fields and learn more about the machinery and how it’s actually processed. Kind of a flop in my opinion. However the gift shop was nice and we found some great gifts for family back home.

I love history! Whether it’s war, cultural, industrial, whatever it is, I love learning about the past.
I really enjoyed the self guided tour with the pictures and short written history explaining the story behind each picture.
If you enjoy history, you’ll enjoy this place.

This little gem is a great way to spend some extra time before you catch your flight home. We learned a lot about the history of the area and sugar came. The artifacts and pictures were very interesting. And it’s only $ 2 for kids and $ 7 for adults for admission! Took about an hour to get through and the gift shop has many great souvenirs!

The Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Museum was disappointing. The museum is a self guided tour through a small house. Depending on how fast you read, you can finish this museum easily under an hour. The museum had some interesting facts about the workers and the plantation, but didn’t provide an in depth explanation review of how the sugar cane was refined. The museum did have a video, but it was made in 2002 and was quite boring.
In the last room of the museum, they had a large model of the sugar mill. Unfortunately, it wasn’t working.
As you exit the museum, you enter into the gift shop where they sell a variety of different sugars, syrups, and souvenirs.
The bathrooms were spotless and well stocked with supplies. This was definitely a plus!
As you leave the museum, you get a small bag of turbinado sugar. I can’t wait to use that in my coffee tomorrow morning.
This museum has a lot of potential, but needs some refurbishing to make it worth anyone’s time.

I learned so much about Maui’s history here, I loved it! Don’t expect to enjoy it passively. You need to be interested in history and read everything you’re walking by. Otherwise it will be boring!

A nice effort to preserve a part of history, but really not worth the visit. Admission was $ 7 for adults. The museum was in a converted house, mostly old photos and a few videos. Some old memorabilia. My 5 year old did not like it at all, so we tried to spend some time in the yard, looking at a few farm tractors and such. But that was over quickly. The gift shop was small, not much in the form of candy or other sugary items. Bathrooms were clean though. This is located across the street from a working sugar mill. Would have been nice if we could tour that place as part of some exhibit.

This sleepy and easy museum makes for a nice visit.
Basics: $ 7 per person, self-​guided tour, good for about an hour or so
The thing about A&B sugar museum is that it doesn’t delve into any one subject (like technology, immigration of workers, manufacturing process, etc) to a fully satisfying depth, but it does at least touch on most of what you might be curious about. It’s not a place to research a PhD on Hawaiian sugar history but honestly, on vacation, would you want it to be? What it lacks in depth is made up by a quiet places that offers the opportunity to relax. If you try a little, the building being the old factory superintendent’s house and the relics can make you feel like you went back a little in time. I was here with a friend that’s from Hawaii, and she recognized a lot of the families/​brands mentioned in the museum as names that have impacted Hawaii to this day. So even though Unilocalers have been a little mean to this place, check it out.

I wanted to know more about the technology and history of sugar, and instead I learned about its growth cycle and a lot about the Alexander and Baldwin family. I did learn a couple cool things about irrigation in Maui, but that was about it on the technology scale.
They also lightly skimmed over the immigrant labor force used to harvest sugar, and I think that could have made for a compelling story as well. The rooms are large, but sparsely filled and some of the most interesting stuff is not displayed well. I think they could have done better, for sure, by adding more artifacts, telling more about the people and engineering that make growing and processing sugar a possibility.
Some of the machines out in the yard are neat, but I didn’t see a placard on every one, so several of them are still a mystery!
Even the museum store is kind of boring, with a few short run printed books and some lackadaisical sugar bags.

7 dollars for 7 minutes. That’s how long it took before I wanted to light something on fire so I could run out of the building screaming of boredom. The relic at the front door was more interesting then the displays. And yes, the place smelled like an old folks home! The cheesy doorbells that lit nothing. The film strip movies that couldn’t hold your attention with a bodyguard. Holy crap Batman, we took too much acid!

A physically small museum but with so much history of Maui (and most of the other Hawaiian Islands, too). A video gives a good introduction to the sugar industry and Asian immigration into Hawaii in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Still pictures are interesting but not always put into context. Scale model of sugar cane processing equipment was incredible!

The Alexander & Baldwin Sugar Museum is a very low-​stress, low-​maintenance, and low-​keyed tour of how the sugar industry was created by Alexander & Baldwain. The tour is set up in a little plantation house, which takes you through about four rooms. The displays are very informative, and are supplemented with vintage sepia photos and replicas of old-​fashioned machines used to make sugar. My favorite part of the tour was looking at how the people in the 1800’s and early 1900’s dressed and established communities around a certain common interest.
The tour is very informative and they have a fun 10 minute video about how sugar was made. Fun to have wood bench seating for 10 people (about 3 people a bench). You can be in and out of this tour in about 30 – 60 minutes.
The tour ends with the gift shop (typical!). There are lots of fun history books, children books, local Maui artisan produces like towels, shirts, seasonings, soaps, etc. Fun to look around!
Adult admission is $ 7. Children 5 and under are free. Don’t forget to take a sample bag of the raw Maui cane sugar when you leave!

This museum appears to be on life support sustained by some very dedicated volunteers. Clearly the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company hasn’t spent a cent on the museum in many years. The story of unbridled exploitation that led to sugar cane as a commercial venture on Hawaii is perhaps not a message they want widely broadcast. The most fascinating object in the museum is an operational scale model of the cane processing conveyor belt. The story of the man who built it is inspirational.
As previous reviewers have mentioned, the museum could use more examples of actual sugar cane processing. The smell and exhibits reminded me of school field trips of yesteryear. Probably worth a visit if you have an hour (and $ 7) to spare and happen to be in the area.

It was so much fun to learn the history of Sugar on Maui. There are so many sugar cane plants around and now I actually know what they are. It was interesting to find out that they only grown for 2 years then are chopped down and the fields burned to start all over again. The museum is right next to the refinery so it is majorly stinky??? Weird, I thought it would smell sweet. The little old ladies that run the place are very informative and will answer any questions you might have. Plus you get a free little raw sugar packet on your way out!!! :)

It was okay but a tad bit boring for me. There’s a $ 5 fee to enter.
The museum is housed in a 1902 former mill superintendent’s residence, across the way from the factory which has been producing sugar since 1902.
Did you know that Maui was born of the sugar industry? It’s true… Maui was once almost entirely covered with cane fields. By 1932 Maui was kicking out over a million tons of sugar!