A&B Ditch Anniversary
September 23, 2008 > MAUI TODAY, > Maui Yesterdays No Comments |
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September 23, 1878: Two hundred men work furiously to complete the A&B ditch before the close of the month. Earlier in the year, the San Francisco sugar baron Claus Spreckels made a request to King Kalakaua, that he be allowed to dig a ditch to feed sugar cane. Kalakaua had a governing cabinet, and at the time, this cabinet rejected Spreckels’ request. 
(Rumor had it that A&B fed them well.) Kalakaua didn’t like this decision, fired the cabinet, created a new one, and that cabinet gave Spreckels the rights he wanted. The agreement shows a loan from Spreckels to Kalakaua of $4,000 (about $80,000 in todays money).
So, why the backbreaking pace for A&B? Because the Kalakaua-Spreckels agreement also said that if A&B didn’t complete its Hamakua ditch by September 30 then the company would lose the ditch and the water rights to Spreckels. After 23 months of work, the company barely made the deadline, at a cost of $80,000 ($1.6 million today). At the time, it moved a then unheard of 40 million gallons of water a day.
1642: Harvard College in Cambridge, Mass, first commencement
1806: Lewis and Clark return to St. Louis after reaching the Pacific Ocean
1949: Truman announces evidence of USSR’s first nuclear device detonation
1952: Richard Nixon makes his “Checker’s” speech
1957: Nine black students who had entered Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas were forced to withdraw
1990: Iraq threatens to destroy Middle East oil fields and attack Israel if other nations tried to force it from Kuwait.
-484: Euripides, Greek playwright
-63: Caesar Augustus, Roman Emporer
1920: Mickey Rooney, actor
1926: John Coltrane, jazz saxophonist
1930: Ray Charles, singer/pianist
1943: Marty Schottenheime, NFL cooach
1947: Mary Kay Place, actress/country singer
1949: Bruce Springsteen, rock musician
1959: Jason Alexander, actor
1967: Harry Connick Jr, singer
1971: Elizabeth Pena, actress
