ÃÂhualoa is an unincorporated rural area along the HÃÂmÃÂkua Coast on the Island of Hawaii in Hawaii County, Hawaii, United States. The Hawaiian language name is believed to mean "long mound", where means to swell, as a wave, heap, or mound, and means long.
ÃÂhualoa is located at 20ð03' North, 155ð28' West (20.06, -155.48).
The Old MÃÂmalahoa Highway is the principal road running through ÃÂhualoa. The land is zoned agricultural. A typical lot is in size. Land use is for residence and small-scale agriculture, including farming, orchards and livestock.
There is no record of Native Hawaiian settlement in the area that is now ÃÂhualoa. It is likely that the Native Hawaiians visited the area for extraction of resources from the à Âhia lehua-hÃÂpuu native forest, but did not live there, as wet forest was not considered a desirable place to live.
According to research for an archaeological survey in 2002, the area that is now ÃÂhualoa:
The land of ÃÂhualoa differs from many other parts of Hawaii in that it was never used for either sugarcane plantations or large-scale cattle ranching. Instead, in the late 19th and early 20th century it was allocated to families of sugarcane workers as farm homesteads, and remains largely so today. The families, primarily Japanese and Portuguese in ethnicity, were the first inhabitants of the area, and many of the present residents are descended from those families. The original native forest was cleared and replaced by a patchwork of pasture, farms and windbreaks. Small-scale ranching did occur, and included a slaughterhouse that operated for a century before closing in 2008. ÃÂhualoa was also the location for early plantings of coffee, which is still being grown there today.
In the 1970s, many countercultural families from Oahu and the mainland US moved to the ÃÂhualoa area. They brought values and ideals of the back-to-the-land movement. A book of material gathered in 2003, Once Upon Ahualoa, explores the experience of this generation with memories and photographs.
Although the main road through ÃÂhualoa has services (electricity, water, telephone, cable internet), many residents living on side roads depend on rainwater tanks as a supply of water. During 2008âÂÂ12, improvements were made to the water supply, supported by federal stimulus funding, including a new deep well at the top of ÃÂhualoa, a 1 million gallon storage tank, and an upgrade of the main waterline to a 12" pipe.