The Lahaina Banyan Tree

The fire that destroyed Lahaina on 8 August 2023 burned the courthouse beside this tree and went over the park it stands in. Maui County's arborist used that word himself: it skipped. The banyan was scorched rather than killed, and roughly 40 percent of its canopy came off afterwards, branches dried out by the superheated air along Front and Hotel Streets. It went in on 24 April 1873, a seedling sent by missionaries in India and planted by sheriff William Owen Smith to mark fifty years since the first American Protestant mission in Lahaina. Banyans do not stay one tree. Aerial roots come down off the limbs, thicken and turn into trunks, and by 2005 there were sixteen of them under a crown covering two thirds of an acre, a quarter of a mile around its edge. That canopy, rather than any trunk, is what makes it the largest banyan in Hawaii. Where it goes from here is genuinely unsettled. A branch snapped in February 2026 and arborists found fungus inside it. A full assessment, tension tests and cambium checks, was being organised rather than scheduled, and the chair of the county's arborist committee put the position plainly: nobody knows what is under the skin. The park is still fenced and closed. You look at it from Front Street, across the ground where the courthouse stood.