Our Lady of the Mount Parish in Honolulu's Kalihi Valley 

This area is called KALIHI-UKA not KALIHI-WAENA which is off of Gulch Ave. about 3 miles down.

Almost as far back in Honolulu's Kalihi Valley as you can drive on the narrow, paved portion of Kalihi Street sits an obscure little cemetery with just a few visible grave markers scattered across the recently mown St. Augustine grass. A faded sign labels the graveyard as part of Our Lady of the Mount Parish and says, "God is watching," as if to warn trespassers away.

The last people to be buried there were in the late 1940s, according to the marker dates that could be read.

Before it was a cemetery, this was the site of the parish's first Catholic church, a simple wood building built 150 years ago in 1870, when Bishop Louis Maigret was the head shepherd and Father Damien was still laboring on the Big Island three years before he went to Molokai. The Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary priests who staffed it served a largely native Hawaiian congregation that lived back in the valley.

In 1903, the parish built a second wooden church two miles away on Monte Street, turning the old church site into a cemetery. By the early 1900s, the mostly Portuguese immigrant church members dedicated the new church to Nossa Senhora do Monte, Our Lady of the Mount. They also brought a replica of the Our Lady statue in Madeira over from Portugal and installed it on the hill near the church.