A Storm-Stranded Ship Delivered the Lumber for the Laie Hawaii Temple

When the Laie Hawaii Temple was built in the early 1900s, the island of Oahu was quite remote. This made it difficult to receive shipments of building materials, such as lumber and other supplies, and several creative means were employed to get around the problem. Crushed lava and coral, both easily available on the island, were added to the concrete that was used to form the entire edifice, including the floors, ceilings, walls, and roof.

But even with this innovation, construction often had to wait while contractors tried to locate missing materials. At one point, construction was at a standstill due to a lack of lumber. Temple contractor Ralph Woolley prayed for help in obtaining the needed supplies. Two days later, during a severe storm, a freight ship was stranded on a nearby coral reef. The captain offered the Saints his cargo of lumber if they would help him unload his ship. The Saints agreed, and the work on the temple resumed.

The Laie Hawaii Temple, sometimes called the 'Taj Mahal of the Pacific,' was the first temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built outside the continental United States. Constructed by hand with the sacrifice of Hawaiian Saints and labor missionaries — because large machinery was not available, the entire excavation for footings through unstable coral and sand was done with picks, shovels, and blasting powder — it was dedicated by President Heber J. Grant on November 27–30, 1919. The first known recorded account of the lumber-ship story is a talk given by Romania Hyde Woolley, Ralph Woolley's wife, on February 17, 1970 — over fifty years after the construction — and it was later included in Chad Hawkins's collected temple histories.