Paia town is a collection of old and new false front buildings along the Hana Highway and up Baldwin Avenue It was the center of a large cluster of plantation camps which sprang up around the sugar mill built in 1880 by Samuel T. Alexander and Henry P. Baldwin. These residential camps were built for the immigrant workers the planters brought in to work in the fields. The area was divided into Upper and Lower Paia, about half-a-mile apart, with the mill pretty much marking the dividing line.

After World War II, faced with labor union demands for better wages and more humane working conditions, Alexander and Baldwin began closing down some of its camps. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, hundreds of plantation families left Paia for homes of their own in Dream City, a Kahului housing community. By the mid-1960s, the streets of the plantation camps in Paia were pretty much deserted and the town wasn't doing so well either.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, hippies from the mainland discovered the area and made it their own, bringing a new vitality to the town. And then, in the 1980s, nearby Hookipa and Spreckelsville waters attracted another breed of folk -- an international crowd of surfers and windsurfers looking for the perfect wave and wind conditions to practice their own brand of obsession.

Today Paia town is a vital and not-so-funky amalgam of restaurants, boutique shops, old-time stores, landmark churches and buildings that include the old Makawao District courthouse. There is also a constant stream of traffic along one of the most traveled thoroughfares on the island.

Old-style plantation camp houses stand cheek-by-jowl alongside bigger, custom-built executive homes. The old-timers and the newcomers get along okay, and everybody complains about the traffic.