, St. James Circle: I
A HUB OF RESILIENCE
t’s Thursday morning and St. James’ Circle in Waimea is a humming hive of activity. The church kitchen is abuzz with volunteers cheerfully chopping ingredients, then cooking and filling pans with the evening’s weekly community meal. Another group of volunteers readies the St. James’ Thrift Store for business. Soon a yoga class will be assembling at Waimea Yoga, Waimea Country School students will be dashing across the grass for their daily physical education class, and little ones will be gathering at Small World Preschool.
By Jan Wizinowich
KeOlaMagazine.com | May – June 2021
The next addition was a graveyard, where Samuel Parker Jr., son of Samuel Parker and Panana Napela, was interred in 1934, followed four years later by original church member Carolyn Sharratt. Eventually the graveyard was bounded by low rock walls and bordered with ‘ōhia and jacaranda trees. Sometime in the 1930s two or three small houses were connected together and placed in the northwest corner of the property and eventually became the vicar’s residence, which is the current church office. The rest of the buildings of St. James’ Circle The Circle in the originated from Making World War II and the St. James’ Circle educational needs of evolved from a small the community. group of dedicated When the 2nd worshipers who met Division Marines in various homes, to arrived in Waimea a circle of buildings from one of the forming a synergy of bloodiest battles of positivity. With the World War II, they arrival of Reverend were in dire need of Frank Merrill in 1911, a hospital and took plans for the new over Waimea School church, dubbed St. and Waimea Hotel, James the Great, leaving students to quickly got underway Headmaster James Taylor on the front porch of the original chapel, built in 1912, surrounded by vibrant poinsettias. attend classes at photo courtesy of Jane Taylor with the order of a various alternative church building from locations and homes. American Portable House Company of Seattle. Waimea needed a school and in 1943 the Seabees got busy With the building on the way, a search for a place to put it constructing the canec buildings that are still standing today. began. That’s where Mabel Beckley, great-granddaughter of Canec was a building material made from bagasse, a fibrous John Palmer Parker, came in. She approached Parker Ranch material that is the byproduct of sugarcane processing. From manager AW Carter, who granted them a 50-by-100-foot plot 1943 to 1945, with the exception of the commandant’s house in the area of the old Waimea Courthouse. (southwest corner), Waimea School students attended classes In December 1912, church members celebrated their first in those buildings. Christmas Eve service and provided the first community Christmas celebration: “On Christmas Eve, members of St. The Hawai‘i Episcopal Academy and the Roots of James’, Mrs. Henry Beckley, her sister Miss Maud Woods, and Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy Miss Nora Keawe, began a tradition at the town hall, part When the war ended, the buildings were left empty and of which is still continued in Waimea today; they provided a the circle was eerily quiet, but not for long; a seed had been Christmas tree and a Santa Claus to distribute gifts for the planted and when Bishop Kennedy observed the empty children of the town.”* buildings, he saw them as a way to meet a community need In 1930, the Sharritt and Arioli families donated the three and began to make plans for a school. By the fall of 1949, acres of rough pastureland bounded by Waikoloa Stream that working with local businessmen, Bishop Kennedy, and St. was to become St. James’ Circle and “the chapel was braced, James’ Church, they opened the Hawai‘i Episcopal Academy lifted onto a stone sledge, and pulled by two Percheron horses (HEA). 34 to the new site.”* Interviewed for this story, Dave Coon (teacher 1950–1951,
