For nearly five decades, this was the site of Hawaiian Canneries, the factory that defined a generation of life in Kapaʻa. The cannery was envisioned in 1913 by Albert Horner, a local businessman who believed pineapple could give homesteaders a foothold where sugar had failed. With financing from H. Hackfeld and a canning operation installed by American Can, the cannery rose as a sprawling corrugated steel building on more than 13 acres next to the Waikaea Canal, fed by 3,400 acres of pineapple fields cultivated by local homesteaders across the surrounding countryside. A single-gauge rail line carried fruit straight into the plant. The dogleg triangular turns you still see in Kapaʻa's streets today are not an accident. They are the ghost lines of that old track, and the town itself was laid out to serve the cannery's needs. Production began in 1915 with a "first pack" of 19,932 cases.

By 1929, Pono Brand had been trademarked as Hawaiian Canneries' signature label. By 1956, the cannery was producing 1.5 million cases a year. Inside the plant, Henry Ginaca's invention, the Ginaca machine, peeled, cored, and sized 50 pineapples a minute. Women trimmed the eyes by hand under long gloves to protect against the fruit's acid. Crews of several hundred worked the lines during harvest season, and during the busy months, just about everyone in Kapaʻa worked at the cannery or was related to someone who did. The stories from those years are often deeply personal. Bill Fernandez, a Kauaʻi native and retired judge, has written about his mother-in-law's family, the Beralas women, who worked the cannery floors, and about Agnes Scharsch, a fourteen-year-old who earned four cents trimming pineapple to send her two older brothers to school in Honolulu. Agnes later said, "I built our home on pineapple savings." That kind of story was common here. A 1.7 million dollar annual payroll moved through the town. Friday paydays felt like a chapter out of Steinbeck's Cannery Row, with movie theaters, gas stations, fish shops, and bars all keeping the lights on because the cannery did.

The cannery also changed who lived here. Japanese plantation workers moved in and opened mom and pop grocery stores. Portuguese families opened dairy farms and repair shops. Former plantation laborers became farmers. Kapaʻa became, in Fernandez's words, "a kaleidoscope of names from every nation." Unlike other plantation communities on Kauaʻi, Kapaʻa was considered a "free town," not regulated by plantation rules. It is one of only two towns on the island that sprang up independent of sugar. A second cannery, the "Up Cannery" (also known as Hawaiian Fruit Packers), opened in 1932 up Kawaihau Road in Kapahi, mauka (toward the mountain). During World War II, the "Pineapple Commandos," GIs stationed on Kauaʻi, volunteered to harvest pineapples in July 1943 to keep the lines moving.

By the late 1950s, dark clouds had begun to gather. Pineapple growers in the Philippines and other tropical countries had recovered from the war and were exporting fruit at prices American operations could not match. The last pack at Hawaiian Canneries came in 1962, sending shock waves through the community much like the sugar plantation closures that followed. About 250 regular employees and 1,500 seasonal workers lost their jobs that year. The Up Cannery held on another ten years before closing in 1972. With it ended an era that had shaped Kapaʻa for half a century.