08/24/2026
For years, the electric bill at ʻIolani Palace - the ONLY royal palace on American soil - was quietly paid by one woman.
The air conditioning there runs 24 hours a day to protect the koa and the crowns. It costs about $15,000 a month. She paid it so the kingdom's house would survive.
Her name was Abigail Kinoiki Kekaulike Kawananakoa. Hawaiians called her the last princess. She never wore a crown. The monarchy was overthrown 33 years before she was born.
She was born in Honolulu on April 23, 1926, the only child of an only child. Her grandfather was Prince David Kawananakoa, an heir to the Hawaiian throne. Her great-grandfather was James Campbell, whose sugar fortune became one of the largest estates in Hawaii. She inherited the bloodline of a kingdom and the money of the plantation era that replaced it. She held no formal title. Hawaiians granted her one anyway.
For nearly three decades she led the Friends of ʻIolani Palace and became its largest benefactor, giving more than $2 million - including the 14-carat diamond from King Kalākaua's own pinky ring, handed over so the public could see it. When the Merrie Monarch Festival needed money in Hilo, she provided it. "She provided the financing so that hula would never fade away," said cultural practitioner Kamaki Kanahele.
Most of her giving, nobody saw. Scholarships. Medical bills. Funerals. Hailama Farden of the royal society Hale O Nā Aliʻi remembered her phone calls: "Can you please make sure that they are taken care of - I don't want them to know."
Then, on June 18, 2017, at age 91, she suffered a stroke.
Within about a month, control of her $215 million fortune had passed to her longtime attorney as trustee. She fired him. It didn't end there.
The fight swallowed her final years. In 2018, a judge ruled she could no longer change her own trust. In 2020, she was ruled unable to manage her own property and affairs. The legal fees reached roughly $7 million - paid out of her own fortune. The woman who had paid for EVERYONE was no longer allowed to pay for anything.
On October 25, 2019, at 93, she stood outside a Honolulu courtroom and gave her answer in one sentence.
"My heritage dictates that I must take care of the Hawaiian people."
She died on December 11, 2022, at her home in Nuʻuanu, her wife at her side. She was 96. The war over her fortune was not finished. It outlived her.
She had spent 96 years taking care of Hawaiians who never knew her name.
Every local family has someone like that - the quiet one who covered the tuition, paid for the funeral, and made everybody swear not to say who.
Then the palace doors opened. On January 22, 2023, Abigail Kawananakoa was carried into the Throne Room of ʻIolani Palace in a 400-pound casket carved from a single 165-year-old koa tree felled by a storm. More than 1,600 people waited hours in line to walk past her. No royal had lain in state there in a century - not since Prince Kuhio in 1922. Her wife Veronica stood beside the casket for all six hours.
In January 2024, thirteen months after her death, the battle finally ended: at least $100 million from her estate now belongs to her foundation, dedicated to Native Hawaiian causes. And this month, a new class of Kuhio Fellows arrives in Washington, D.C. - young Native Hawaiian leaders placed inside the offices of Congress, housed and supported by the woman a court said could not manage her own money.
In March 2023 she was laid to rest at Mauna Ala, the Royal Mausoleum, the first burial there since 1953. The monarchy she descended from has been gone for more than 130 years. Abigail Kawananakoa never got to rule anything. She simply spent 96 years doing what she believed a kingdom was for - taking care of its people. The kingdom fell. The kuleana didn't.
