The 1836 Waioli Mission House built by the Reverend W.P. Alexander, was home for missionary teachers Abner and Lucy Wilcox and their seven sons. The first missionaries had arrived in the islands in 1820, and by 1838 when the Wilcox's arrived, the Hawaiian Kingdom was in a period of upheaval. Introduced technologies, commodities, and diseases were transforming the Hawaiian population. Here at the mission station in Hanalei, the native population of Kaua`i's north shore would gather every Sunday during these hard times. The Waioli Mission House and its story is one of the few remaining places in the archipelago where one can learn about this interface between white missionaries and the Native peoples.

Today the house is a time capsule. For 50 years after Abner and Lucy’s deaths in 1869, the old mission home sat empty until it was restored in 1921 by their granddaughters Etta, Elsie, and Mabel Wilcox. Today, visitors going through the house feel as if the Wilcox's will be back in 20 minutes. Everything that remained in the house was left as-is, and the sisters purchased period replacement pieces to fill out what had gone missing.

This house tells the story of the lives of the missionaries themselves, but also of that early period of Hawaiian history - a time when the Hawaiian population was well on its way to being one of the most literate countries on earth, thanks to the efforts of missionaries like the Wilcox's.

Behind the house and property is the beautiful Wai`oli valley, where farmers still grow taro as they have for centuries, on lands connected with the mission house.