KAHULUI – Jane Tesoro can still remember crying in kindergarten after her family had just moved from the Hayashi plantation camp outside of Waikapu to the heart of Wailuku.

“I missed the great outdoors, playing in the cane fields and ditches,” Tesoro said, recalling her move from her rural life to one more urban in the early 1950s.

Her father, the late Seimo Oshiro, was a tractor mechanic for Wailuku Sugar Co. and had his bento lunch made every day by his wife, Sueko Oshiro, who is now 95 years old. Mr. Oshiro labored 47 years with Wailuku Sugar.

“My father never ate a sandwich. He never ate pizza. It always had to be (rice and) okazu,” Tesoro said, recalling her family’s plantation roots. Okazu in Japanese is a side dish made to go with rice, such as fish, meat, vegetable or tofu.

Tesoro, a 66-year-old Waikapu resident remembers people saying that when someone got married in a plantation camp, the entire camp spent the day cooking for the celebration.

“Everyone would help each other out. This is the kind of community, ohana that is missing here,” she said. “It’s not one employer keeping everything together.”

It was a different way of life in the plantation camps and when families worked for the plantation, recalled Tesoro, a member of the Waikapu Community Association.

Memories such as Tesoro’s were highlighted Saturday during the 2016 Plantation Festival celebrating Maui’s cultural community at the Queen Ka’ahumanu Center.

Longtime Maui residents identified themselves in black-and-white picture displays and also found their family names in old booklets.

In addition to Waikapu Community Association’s exhibit, which featured photos from Wailuku Sugar Co.’s workers and the demolition of the Wailuku mill, there were historical pieces and photos from the Portuguese community, old plantation camp maps, and photographs, hats and T-shirts for sale benefitting the A Hui Hou Fund. The fund aims to provide emergency relief assistance to Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. workers who will be losing their jobs with the end of sugar operations this year.

Former longtime Wailuku Sugar Co. employee Regino “Reggie” Cabacungan is saddened by the last plantation in the state shutting down.

“Ah, that’s a sad thing. You tell me what they going do with the land,” said the 85-year-old from Happy Valley.

He is worried that the land will be bought up by millionaires who will build houses.

Alexander & Baldwin, the parent company of HC&S, has said that it plans to look to diversified agriculture. Options could include grass-finished livestock operations, energy crops, agroforestry, diversified food crops and orchard crops, among others, according to company officials.

Cabacungan worked for Wailuku Sugar Co. for 29 years in various positions such as steam generator operator and mechanic. He said that his company’s garage was where the Wailuku Post Office now stands.

He also was responsible for recording, through pictures, the demolition of the old mill back in the 1980s, and for other photos, which are now treasured by the Waikapu Community Association. Wailuku Sugar ended its sugar operations in the late 1980s. It became known as Wailuku Agribusiness and sold and grew macadamia nuts. It later got out of agriculture and became Wailuku Water Co.

Cabacungan chuckled about the photos, saying that he took them when his boss was away.

Accompanying Cabacungan on Saturday to view the displays was friend and former co-worker Kazuo Koyanagi, 90, who served as a welder for Wailuku Sugar until his retirement in 1988.

The Filipino community was also represented at the event.

Students from University of Hawaii Maui College’s Kabatak Club, which means “coming together” in Tagalog, helped festivalgoers write their names in Baybayin, which was described as an ancient Filipino form of writing.

Haydie Tapat, 19, the club’s secretary, said that people could write their names on green slips of paper that represent sugar cane leaves and stick them in the mock sugar cane stalks at the club’s booth.

Tapat said she was told by her mother that her grandmother was a sakada. The sakada were Filipino contract workers who immigrated to Hawaii between 1906 and 1946 to work as laborers for the state’s sugar plantations.

* Melissa Tanji can be reached at mtanji@mauinews.com.