Reverend Elias Bond (1813-1896) and his wife, Ellen Mariner Howell, who came to be known as Father and Mother Bond, arrived in Kohala in 1841 as Protestant Congregationalist missionaries with American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. That year, construction on the original Homestead main house was completed. Additional structures were added as the Bond family grew. Father and Mother Bond raised 9 of their own children at the Homestead and became educators to many of the youth of Kohala. Father Bond started “Boys Select School,” at the Homestead, teaching the area’s young men, while Mother Bond educated girls, holding lessons in her small kitchen.
In 1889, a cottage was added to the Homestead for Father Bond’s son, Dr. Benjamin Bond (1853–1930) and his wife Emma Renton Bond. Dr. Bond, the Homestead’s last full-time occupant, served as Kohala’s first western medical practitioner. The only trained medical doctor within a wide radius, Dr. Bond, like his father, made long daily trips throughout Kohala for house visits. Dr. Bond also saw patients at his office, which stands between the Doctor’s Cottage and the original Homestead house. Gardens around the Homestead featured medicinal plants from the Western, Hawaiian, and Chinese traditions, as Dr. Bond catered to his patients of diverse ethnic backgrounds during Kohala’s sugar cane plantation era.
Long uninhabited but still fully furnished, the Bond Homestead was damaged severely by the October 2006 earthquake. Contents retrieved from the crumbled buildings are currently catalogued in climate controlled containers, being preserved until the buildings can be properly restored to serve as a museum housing a collection of historical artifacts and showcasing the rich history of the Bond family and the people of Kohala.
