Welcome to ʻEwa

Date: March 2024

By: Grace Schonhardt

When I was a little girl, the irrigation trestle that went over Fort Weaver Road is where I considered to be the border of Ewa Town. In 1976, my family moved 6.6 miles from Waipahu Plantation to Ewa. Although there was the Ewa Shopping Basket right in town, we still drove weekly to Waipahu to buy goods from Gems at the ewa end of Waipahu or Big Way on Waipahu Depot Road beneath the Waipahu Sugar Mill nestled in the middle of Waipahu. After shopping, my dad would drive our blue 1969 Camaro along the winding Fort Weaver Road through Honouliuli, past the pig farms and the smell, and past endless fields of sugar cane gently bending in the breeze. When the young cane stalks were still low to the ground, I could glimpse the horses at the mill stable on the left side of Fort Weaver Road just before the trestle. Once we drove beneath the irrigation trestle on Fort Weaver Road, I knew we were close to home. 

View towards Waipahu Town in the distance. The original Fort Weaver Road was built to connect Pu’uloa (Pearl Harbor) to Iroquois Point in the early 1900s when the United States acquired land to build a defense system along the coastline. A Fort Weaver was built and named after Erasmus Morgan Weaver, Jr, a US Army Major General who served as the first chief of the Militia Bureau and the Chief of the Army’s US Army Coast Artillery Corps. A new Fort Weaver Road was built connecting Waipahu directly to Ewa Beach and bypassed Honouliuli. The new road was completed in 1982. 

The undated black and white photo shows the irrigation trestle in the distance over Fort Weaver Road. Note the crushed coral rock road. The mill stable was located near the tree on the left of the road. 

The photo was taken November 2023 heading towards Ewa on Fort Weaver Road. The West Loch Fairways subdivision is located on the left side of the road.