Wednesday, July 17, 2013

► Maria Patton Chamberlain Letters

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, January 12, 1959 - "Clarice B. Taylor's Tales about Hawaii"

     The New England missionaries were people with the same emotions as you and I.

     This simple fact is borne by reading the unpublished letters of Maria Patton Chamberlain preserved today by her great-great-grandson David Forbes, a student at the Hawaii Preparatory Academy in Kamuela, Hawaii.

     Maria Patton was a missionary teacher, one of four single ladies who came to Hawaii in 1828 with the Third Company of Missionaries. She was stationed at Lahaina, Maui as a teacher and lived with the family of the Reverend William Richards.

WEDS MISSIONARY
     She was there from April to September 1 of 1828 when she married the only bachelor of the mission, Levi Chamberlain. She was 25 at the time. He was 36.

     Levi Chamberlain had come to Hawaii with the Second Company in 1823 to become the Superintendent of Secular Affairs for the Mission. He had left a successful business career in Boston.

     Mr. Chamberlain was a painstaking accountant. It is to him that we are indebted for much of our knowledge of early Hawaiian history. Mr. Chamberlain scribbled incessantly. He kept a detailed dairy <spelling original to text> and he never threw away any communication...


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