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Word of the Day – Thursday, August 23rd |
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LANAI (luh-NEYE) 1.
An island of central Hawaii
Lanai, known as The Exclusive Island, is the sixth-largest of the Hawaiian Islands. It was formerly known as The Pineapple Island because of its past as an island-wide pineapple plantation. The only town is Lanai City (elevation 1,600 ft) with a population of approximately 3,000.
The island is shaped somewhat like a guitar-pick, with a width of 18 miles in the longest direction and 13 miles wide. The land area is 141 square miles (367 km²). It is separated from the island of Molokai by the Kalohi Channel to the north, and from Maui by the Auau Channel to the east.
At the beginning of the 1900s, Charles Gay, a member of the Robinson family that owns Niihau, purchased the entire island of Lanai for $100,000. His intentions to operate a cattle ranch were realized when he imported herds from Kauai and Niihau. In 1909, due to financial difficulty, Gay sold all of the island save for 600 acres to a group of businessmen for Lanai Ranch Company. Gay ventured to agriculture and tried to establish a pineapple production. The Lanai Ranch Company was moderately sucessful, and then failed, was bought by Henry Baldwin, who then sold the entire company and island to James Dole, the president of the Dole Food Company in 1922, for $1.1 million. He proceeded in a new direction, and developed Lanai into the world's largest pineapple plantation.
Dole transformed 18,000 acres of Lanai's red volcanic soil into pineapple fields that supplied 90% of the world's pineapple consumption. With these profits, Dole built the Kaumalapau Harbor, at the base of the island's western cliffs in 1925. Lanai City was built at a centralized location for the pineapple field workers to live. Dole Park was placed in the center of the town, and tiny, ten room Hotel Lanai was the first inn on the island. To satisfy the pineapple production demand, Lanai welcomed new working residents of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Korean descent, and the island's population grew to 3,000.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Lanai".
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