William Owen Smith William Owen Smith influenced the affairs of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the establishment of Liliʻuokalani Trust. He was a trustee of LT from 1909 to 1929.Born on Kaua’i on Aug. 4, 1848, William Owen Smith came from a family of missionaries and physicians who settled in the Islands in the mid-1800s. His parents, James William Smith and Milicent Knapp, raised him and his siblings Melicent Lena and Jared Knapp. As a youth, Smith attended Punahou School (known as Oʻahu College) in Honolulu and The Rev. Daniel Dole’s missionary school on Kaua’i. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (formerly Massachusetts Agricultural College), labored on a sugar plantation and worked in the office of Judge Alfred S. Hartwell before joining public service. From 1870 to 1872, Smith briefly was the sheriff of Kaua’i and Maui. He planted a banyan tree in Lahaina town in 1873 to honor the 50th anniversary of the arrival of Protestant missionaries to Maui. It grew to over 60 feet and provided shade for an entire city block for more than a century. On Aug. 8, 2023, a wildfire destroyed most of Lahaina town — the banyan tree survived. He married May Abbey Hobron on March 23, 1876, and had five children: Clarence Hobron, Ethel Frances Smith, Pauline Melicent, Anna Katherine and Lorrin Knapp. Over the next 40 years, Smith was a leader in business and government in Hawaiʻi. He served as Director of the Inter-Island Steam Navigation Co., President of the Guardian Trust Co. and Director of Alexander & Baldwin. The Planters' Labor & Supply Co., which he organized with the Chamber of Commerce in Honolulu, published a daily journal called the Planters' Labor & Supply Co., of which Smith was an editor and writer. He also served as Hawaiʻi's attorney general between 1893 and 1899, marking the transitional period between the Provisional Government of Hawaiʻi and the Republic and Annexation. He also was a member of the Executive Council and the Commissioner of Crown Lands while in office.In 1893, Smith played a key role in the Committee on Safety that changed Hawaiʻi's status from a kingdom to a United States territory. Two years later, as a member of the Board of Health, he visited New Zealand to study liquor license systems and land-transfer practices and traveled to Japan and Hong Kong to study quarantine systems.In 1899 — one year after the annexation of Hawaiʻi by the United States — Smith resigned as Attorney General and was appointed as the first delegate of the Territory to represent the Republic of Hawaiʻi at a Washington session of Congress. He served as a Territorial Senator from 1907 and 1911, and later as Senate President. During this period, Queen Liliʻuokalani sought assistance from Smith to establish a living trust for the benefit of Native Hawaiian children. He became a trustee in 1909. In his lifetime, Smith also was a trustee for the Alexander Young Estate, Lunalilo Estate and Bishop Estate. He died on April 13, 1929, in his home in Nuʻuanu.