Taylor Camp: Inside Hawaii's Burned-Down Hippie Treehouse Village
- Apr 21, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 27
In 1969, a man who looked like he'd wandered off the set of Sinbad the Sailor sold everything he owned, sailed his family from Oahu to Kauai, and bailed thirteen strangers out of jail on a whim. Within a few years, the beach he handed them had grown into a treehouse village of over a hundred people, with its own church, its own free grocery store, and exactly one law. It lasted eight years before the state burned it to the ground.
A Modernist Dream House That Never Got Built
The man was Howard Taylor, brother of Elizabeth Taylor, and he hadn't set out to start a commune. He'd bought seven acres of oceanfront land at the very end of the road in Haena, on Kauai's north shore, and drawn up plans for a modernist home. The county wouldn't grant him a building permit. Frustrated, Taylor drove to the county jail in Wailua, where thirteen young hippies from Berkeley were sitting on vagrancy charges, and bailed every one of them out himself. He told them about his land at the end of the road and said they could live there and do whatever they wanted.
It was, on paper, a strange kind of revenge against county bureaucracy. What it became was one of the more unusual experiments in communal living the country produced in the 1970s.
Building a Village Out of a Dying Plantation
Taylor Camp grew fast, eventually housing more than a hundred people at a time, drawn in first by word of mouth and later by magazine coverage. Building materials came cheap and close to hand. Hawaii's plantation industry was collapsing around Kauai in 1969, and the Kilauea Plantation was selling off its old homes for $100 apiece, with a $50 discount if the buyer cleared the lot themselves, on the condition the houses were dismantled and hauled away. Campers used the salvaged lumber to build multilevel treehouses connected by rope bridges, with old veranda windows repurposed as skylights and layers of clear plastic sheeting for roofing.
The centerpiece was a structure known as the Big House, with walls that ran a hundred feet long. As the population grew toward a peak of around 120, the community settled on a single rule to keep it from sprawling further: no more houses. Beyond that, residents built communal toilets and showers, ran a food co-op out of a free store, and even elected their own mayor and sheriff. They worshipped, when they worshipped at all, at a congregation they founded themselves and called the Church of the Brotherhood of the Paradise Children.
It's the kind of intentional, rules-free settlement that echoes other doomed 20th-century experiments in island utopia, like the small group of Europeans who tried to build paradise on an empty Galápagos island a few decades earlier, and found that isolation brings out as much conflict as it does peace.
The Land Wasn't Empty to Begin With
It's easy to tell this story as though Howard Taylor's seven acres were an untouched patch of jungle waiting for someone to claim it, but Haena had been home to Native Hawaiian families for centuries before any hippie ever set foot there. The ahupuaa of Haena appears throughout Hawaiian oral tradition, including the story of the demigod Lohiau, who lived and died there before being restored to life by the goddess Hiiaka. When the state opened the surrounding 65-acre Haena State Park in 1972, right in the middle of Taylor Camp's run, Native Hawaiian families who had farmed that land for generations were permanently displaced along with it. So while the campers were busy building treehouses and dodging permits, the land underneath them was going through its own, much older loss that rarely makes it into the retelling.
Through Local Eyes
Not every account of Taylor Camp comes from a former resident. A 2019 documentary called The Edge of Paradise gathered the memories of the Kauai locals who lived alongside the camp rather than in it, including the family of Bill Kaauwai, one of the police officers who patrolled Haena during the camp's early years. Kaauwai recalled that officers back then knew so little about identifying marijuana that the Lihue police station kept its own reference plants growing in the courtyard, just so they'd know what they were looking at when they made an arrest. His daughters, who grew up camping nearby, remembered sneaking off as kids to see what the campers were up to, using shell collecting as their cover story.
Who Actually Lived There
The camp's residents were never just Berkeley hippies. Over its eight years it pulled in surfers, runaway teenagers, young families, and a steady stream of Vietnam veterans who'd come home to a country that didn't especially want them back. Photographer John Wehrheim moved to Kauai in 1971 and started documenting the camp almost as soon as he arrived, though he didn't take the project seriously until he returned in 1975 from a stint photographing Tibetan refugees in Asia. He ended up shooting more than a hundred black and white images of daily life there, later collected into a 272-page book with a fold-out 1976 map of the camp, and the material also became the basis of a 2010 documentary directed by Margo Romero and Robert C. Stone.
Puka Shells and a Very Famous Sister-in-Law
The camp's cultural reach went further than Kauai. Campers gifted Elizabeth Taylor a puka shell necklace, and photos of her wearing it helped kick off a puka shell fashion trend that spread across the mainland. Howard Taylor himself became something like Kauai's first celebrity transplant, and his presence on the north shore is often credited with drawing a wave of other well-known names to the island in the years that followed.
How It Fell Apart
The unraveling started with attention. In 1973, Surfer magazine ran a feature on the camp, and the quiet stretch of coastline was suddenly overrun with transient surfers who had no interest in contributing to the community, just in chasing waves and leaving trash behind. Harder drugs followed the crowds in. The same freedom that had drawn people looking to heal also gave cover to people who just wanted to disappear into addiction, and residents who'd been there from the start spent years pushing back against an element that didn't share the original ethos.
The legal fight ran in parallel. The county had condemned the land as early as 1973, and the case against the campers was originally prosecuted by Eduardo Malapit, who would later become mayor of Kauai and make shutting the camp down a plank of his own administration. Around sixty residents sued to stay, and lost. By late 1977, after nearly a decade of losing legal battles, only a handful of holdouts remained.
That's when the state moved in for good. County police and state officials evicted the last residents and burned the treehouses, the church, and the free store to the ground, clearing the site to build what's now Haena State Park. Photographer John Wehrheim later wrote that the fire left little behind but ashes and memories of, in his words, the best days of their lives.
What's Left Today
The site is still part of Haena State Park, and it's kept deliberately undeveloped, so there's essentially nothing left to see where the treehouses once stood. What survives instead is Wehrheim's photography, the 2010 documentary, and the memories of the people who lived there, some of whom still gather to talk about a strange, brief experiment where a Hollywood family's frustration with a county permit office accidentally produced one of the most unusual communities in American history.
"Leaving Taylor Camp was like leaving a piece of my soul behind. It may have been just a makeshift village on a remote beach, but to me, it was paradise." - Barefoot Bob
These are just a sample of the imagery created, if you can get your hands on the book by John Wehrheim I strongly urge you to so.
“Taylor Camp wasn’t a commune,” Wehrheim writes in the introduction. “It had no guru, no clearly defined leadership, and never had a single voice. It had no written ordinances. It wasn’t a democracy. It was much more than that: a community guided by a spirit that created order without rules.”
Taylor Camp—John Wehrheim’s photographs of the alternative community are an absolutely fascinating insight into early 70s 'hippie culture'
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