Much has been made of the cultural artifacts destroyed in the Lahaina fire. However, amidst the ruins is emerging some good news.
The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports that numerous artifacts have been recovered from the fire debris at the 170-year-old school and parish hall, Hale Aloha, and the Wo Hing Chinese Museum.
“We’re finding dozens of objects that survived,” said Kimberly Flook, deputy executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, which oversaw 14 historic sites in Lahaina. “Native Hawaiian stone artifacts did really, really well. Ceramics did pretty decently. Metal did really well. … Natural, hard materials, like bone, ivory and shell actually did pretty well.”
Included in those finds is a set of silverware from the Baldwin family whose patriarch Dwight Baldwin started some of the largest businesses in Hawaii. Also recovered were ancient Chinese coins in the Wo Hing Museum.
“We found 24 of the 30 coins, in this massive disaster, exactly where we thought they would be.”
The findings booster a community in need of good news. Since the fire on August 8, they have tried to remain optimistic.
“History resides in people, so we haven’t lost our history, ” said Theo Morrison, executive director of the nonprofit foundation, back in September. “What we’ve lost are the tangible items that help us remember that history and help us tell the story of that history.”
They took solace knowing that the world-famous Banyan Tree escaped scarred but intact.
“The tree survived for a reason, ” said President Joe Biden during an. “I believe it is a very powerful symbol of what we can and will do to get through this crisis.”
Now they are slowly finding more items that have withstood the intense flames. They are confident they will find more.
“Wo Hing had a lot of jade, and jade has a really good chance of surviving,” Flook said. “Jade is also easily portable. So it was an easy thing to just go in, load it up and carry it out … jade fu dogs, jade bowls, jade statuary, jade funeral belts, things like that.”
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