The most famous rulers of Hawaii live in Wailuku. This town is also the place where in the year 1970 at the Iao Valley, Kamehameha won a decisive victory. The town of Wailuku is where the huge sugar industry was born, and this sugar industry played a major part in influencing the town itself, as well as the island, and also the whole state. The Mission Station of the nineteenth century was also located Wailuku.

In the pre historic age of Hawaii, the area of Wailuku had the status of being the center of population and power. When missionaries from New England came to Hawaii in the middle of the 1800s, they changed the area by influencing it with their own beliefs about religion, new and improved agricultural methods, and western implements and skills. A number of plantations as well as the Wailuku began to mill and grow sugar cane in the 1860s and were very busy in doing so.

Ditches which stretched to miles very dug. These were dug for the purpose of water for irrigation from deep in the mountains so that the water could be used in the expansive fields which were located in the center of Maui. As a result of this the industry of sugar cane did very well.