A group of local buyers has purchased 21 acres in Lahaina that include the historic 225-foot-tall Pioneer Mill Co. smokestack for $19.9 million, but the plans for the industrial property in the heart of the burn zone have not been made public.

Pioneer Mill Site LLC closed the purchase on March 10 from Pioneer Mill Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Kaanapali Land, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale includes four adjacent parcels of industrial-zoned land, including 19.6 acres at 301 Lahainaluna Road that include the smokestack, an 0.5-acre property at 961 Limahana Place, an 0.86-acre property at 952 Limahana Place and a 1,244-square-foot sliver of land known as Lot 23 of the Wili Ko Subdivision on Wili Ko Place, according to documents from the state Bureau of Conveyances provided to the Hawai‘i Journalism Initiative.

The purchase comes nearly three years after the Aug. 8, 2023 wildfire destroyed Kaanapali Land’s offices, coffee mill and other buildings on the 19-acre site, including a store leased to Maui Grown Coffee. 

Kaanapali Land, which is headquartered in Chicago and owns nearly 4,000 acres on Maui, did not respond to a request for comment.

Documents with the Bureau of Conveyances list Kyle Sakamoto and Patrick Ing as managers of Pioneer Mill Site LLC. The company’s mailing address is Ing’s certified public accountant office in Wailuku. Ing and Sakamoto, who was named senior vice president of Bank of Hawaiʻi in its Maui Commercial Banking Center in 2021, could not be reached for comment.

Theo Morrison, executive director of the Lahaina Restoration Foundation that has been leasing part of the property since 2008, said she did not know the identities of all of the buyers but that they were based in Hawai‘i, with one telling her that he had grown up in Waihe‘e with sugar cane in his backyard.

Morrison said she was looking forward to working with local ownership and hoped the nonprofit could move forward with efforts to repair the nearly century-old smokestack and return two plantation-era locomotives to the site where they were once housed before the fire. 

“It’s going to be fabulous,” she said. “They understand the value of maintaining the history.”

She said the foundation “has been in limbo” since the fire, which also destroyed the nonprofit’s offices and damaged to different degrees several of the historic properties that it oversees.

After the fire, Kaanapali Land told the foundation that they would be selling the property with the iconic smokestack, which stood prominently in the charred ruins of the town.

The fire impacted Kaanapali Land’s agricultural operations, which include coffee, banana and citrus cultivation, as well as ranching, according to the sales agreement hammered out in June 2024. Due to damage to the coffee mill, the company was unable to process and sell the 2023 year coffee crop.

“Although the Company currently expects that the Company’s insurance coverage will compensate the Company for the majority of its losses incurred in connection with the fire and related devastation, including the costs of its structures and equipment lost in the fire, the loss in revenue from the lack of coffee sales, and the loss of income from the licensees, there can be no assurances the Company will be fully compensated for such losses,” the agreement said.

According to the agreement, Kaanapali Land’s revenues dropped from $3 million from January to June 2023 to $964,000 during the same period in 2024. At the time of the agreement, the company owned about 3,900 acres on Maui, with about 1,500 acres in conservation. 

Currently, the former mill site is being used as a baseyard and has signs on-site advertising space available to lease, Morrison said.

While the future of the site remains unknown, Maui County Council Member Tamara Paltin said she hoped it wouldn’t affect the county’s plans to extend Kuhua Street, which borders the old Pioneer Mill site. During the 2023 fire, the narrow road trapped many residents trying to flee the flames and was one of the deadliest sites with 40 of the 102 known deaths happening in the Kuhua Camp neighborhood. Extending Kuhua Street is one of the high-priority projects for Lahaina’s recovery.

Paltin, who holds the West Maui residency seat, said the county had been interested in acquiring the Pioneer Mill site, but it is limited to paying the appraisal rates and “can’t get involved in any kind of bidding war.”

In 2023, the 19-acre Pioneer Mill site had an assessed value of $12.4 million for both the land and the buildings, according to Maui County property tax records. No assessed values have been listed for the site since the fire.

The 952 Limahana Place property had an assessed value of $1.3 million in 2026, while the 961 Limahana Place site was appraised at $1.05 million in 2023. The Wili Ko Subdivision lot had an assessed value of $100.

Appraisal values, which reflect the market value of the property, tend to be higher than county property tax assessment values.

Paltin said she hopes that whatever the new owners use the site for, “that it will be a harmonious usage to the surrounding neighbors.” She said there are plenty of needs for industrial space in Lahaina, including a recycling center.

“It would be great if they used the land for a purpose that the community needs,” Paltin said. “That would be like a best-case scenario. At $19.9 million, I imagine they’re looking for a return on their investment and I’m not sure what that would be that would hopefully help out our community as well.”

Now that the site has been sold, Morrison is hopeful that the Lahaina Restoration Foundation can extend the 20-year lease it signed in March 2008 and get a contractor on site so they can start working to repair spalling in the smokestack that happened before the fire. 

The smokestack was built out of brick and concrete in 1928, and it was then the tallest in Hawai‘i at 225 feet, about 20 stories.

“When the mill’s boilers were burning bagasse (fibers leftover once juice is extracted from cane stalks), cloud-like puffs rose out of the smokestack, indicating steam was being produced to generate electricity,” according to the foundation. 

Restoring the smokestack was the very first task Morrison faced when she became director of the foundation in June 2008. After the mill closed in 1999, the company had knocked off about 10 feet from the top of the smokestack, which had deteriorated from decades of pumping out acidic smoke.

The dismantling turned into a huge issue “because they ruined a historic site,” Morrison recalled. Her predecessor, Keoki Freeland, agreed that the foundation would take over the work of restoring the smokestack. Shortly after, he retired, and Morrison took over. 

“It was like holy cow, how am I supposed to do this?” Morrison remembered thinking at the time. 

To help fund the $600,000 project, the foundation sold commemorative bricks that donors could inscribe with their names to place at the base of the smokestack. Maui residents and former Pioneer Mill employees funded most of the four-month restoration project, which included “the installation of 17 carbon steel tension bands, a steel door over the flue duct breeching, repair of the exterior concrete, waterproof coating over the entire exterior, and a 14-foot tall carbon steel crown on top,” according to the foundation’s website.

Morrison recalled a helicopter “crowned the smokestack” with the newly finished piece in 2010, and the exterior was repainted.

For decades, the smokestack has served as a landmark for drivers coming from the fields and fishers out at sea, and after the Aug. 8, 2023 fire, it was one of the most notable sights on the leveled landscape. 

“Every picture you look at of Lahaina after the fire, like a view from the mountains or even from the ocean, you see the smokestack,” Morrison said. “It was the one major thing that survived.”

But for others in Lahaina, the smokestack has long stood as a painfully enduring symbol of colonialism and the harm done by sugar plantations across the islands that diverted water from Native Hawaiian farmers growing traditional subsistence crops like kalo. Some have called for the smokestack to be torn down.

In the days after the deadly blaze, community members and historic experts also pointed out that the parched Lahaina landscape that fed the fast-moving brushfire was a result of the nearly 150-year legacy of the mill diverting water from streams to cultivate its thirsty sugar crops.  

Founded by carpenter James Campbell in 1860, Pioneer Mill was the first plantation to grow sugar commercially in Lahaina, according to the Lahaina Restoration Foundation and the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association archives at the University of Hawai‘i. 

The plantation grew from 600 acres in 1885 to more than 10,000 acres in 1935. The company started out transporting cut sugar cane from the fields to the mill via water-drive flumes and cattle-driven carts before switching to trains on the slopes of the West Maui Mountains in the 1880s and then to trucks by 1953. 

In 1910, the company employed 1,600 workers, and like most plantations, had grown into a full-fledged community with a kindergarten for 800 to 1,000 children by 1914 and a network of services that included the Lahaina Light and Power Company, Lahaina Ice Company, the Lahaina and Pu‘ukoli‘i stores and the Pioneer Mill Hospital.

During World War II in the 1940s, which “caused a severe labor shortage,” the company dropped over 1,000 acres from cultivation. High school students went to classes four days a week so they could spend Fridays and Saturdays on the plantation. 

Morrison said when the foundation put up interpretive plaques about the history of the mill, “we don’t shy away” from the negative impacts the sugar industry had on Hawai‘i. 

“History is telling the whole story — the good, the bad, the ugly,” she said. 

For eight years, the foundation held “plantation days” at the Pioneer Mill site, and Morrison said it was never about supporting the company but about honoring the employees who worked hard for low pay and “were never really celebrated.”

“The society they built, that’s the society we have now,” Morrison said.

One year, they set up booths with photos and medals from the sporting events that made up a huge part of plantation life, and Lahaina residents came by to find pictures of their grandparents and relatives. 

The plantation days came to a halt when Kaanapali Land started leasing out the space to school buses and there was no longer room to hold the event. 

For now, there are no plans to revive it, Morrison said.

However, she hopes they can eventually bring back two original steam locomotives that used to deliver sugar cane and were on display at the mill site prior to the fire. In the 1950s, after the mill switched to trucks, many rail cars were sold to off-island owners.

In 2011, the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Foundation donated two of the locomotives to the foundation and returned them to Maui, where a crane set them on a section of railroad track at the mill site. 

The locomotives survived the fire except for the roof of one of the cabs which was blown off by the strong winds. However, after Kaanapali Land said they had to be moved ahead of the sale, Morrison said the foundation spent $12,000 to relocate them to the parking lot behind the Baldwin Home on Front Street.