Volcano is a special place. It’s one of the few communities left in the Hawaiʻi located in a native forest or woodlands, and for more than 100 years, the village has attracted a diverse group of people who appreciate its green setting, active volcano, cool and rainy weather, artistic and spiritual callings, and, above all, a sense of a tightly knit community. Those who have come and stayed include Japanese truck farmers and their descendants, businessmen from Hilo, Honolulu and beyond looking for a summer home, native Hawaiian families, artists, scientists, old hippies and back-to-the-land types, writers, entrepreneurs, crafters, dreamers, rat-race refugees, misfits, retirees, and families of every sort looking for nothing more than a quiet, affordable place to live and raise their children. When asked what brought them to, and keeps them in Volcano, almost everyone uses words like affordable, unique, magical, spiritual, enchanted, sacred and community. The Volcano landscape is as diverse as its people. Frmo Akatsuk’s Nursery along Kahaualeʻa Road in the east to the Volcano Golf Course and Subdivision, a seven-mile stretch, the village encompasses several environmental zones and residential neighborhoods, each with their own distinct characteristics. At its core, there is a one-mile stretch along Old Volcano road that includes the village’s most historic buildings and commercial establishments, with two general stores, a couple of restaurants, art galleries, a hardware store and a coin-operated laundry. Down Wright Road there’s an agricultural district, where since the 1950s Volcano’s farmers have grown everything from chamomile tea to plums and ōhelo berries. And everywhere longtime residents and newcomers live side-by-side with visitors staying in some of the more than 100 bed-and-breakfast and vacation rental homes. People come and go, but the sense of a historic community stays the same. Annual rainfall can vary by 20 inches or more from one end of the town to the other. In some areas, the rich soil created by old Mauna Loa eruptions is 30 feet deep; in other places there are only 2 or 3 inches of soil atop the more recent Kilauea lava flows. Some homes have been around more than 100 years, and new ones are being built every month. “Yes, there are a multitude of opinions here,” the Volcano architect and photographer Boone Morrison once said. “But we all have one thing in common: We dig Volcano.” Or as poet Garrett Hongo, who was born in Volcano, put it “Everybody is here because they got something they were looking for or something they found here.” The community is surrounded by protected natural areas. To the west are rain forests, dry `ōhi`a woodlands, and pioneer vegetation on the young lava flows in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, recognized as an International Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site. Toward the south are the protected rain forests of Kahaualeʻa Natural Area Reserve, while the rain forests of Puʻu Makaʻala Natural Area Reserve, the national park’s `Ōla`a Forest, and the state’s `Ōla`a Forest Reserve are to the north. The village grew and spread out in waves and distinct patterns. In the beginning, Volcano was just a place people passed through. For centuries, Native Hawaiians used pathways through the forests and lava to move between Hilo, the Puna Coast, and Kaʻu, but there’s little evidence that they ever stopped for long in the area of what’s now Volcano Village. There is ample archaeological evidence, however, that the area was used to harvest plants from the forest, capture birds for food and feathers, quarry stones and make tools, fight battles, and watch in awe and fear as centuries of Kīlauea eruptions flared, then died down. The village emerged in the early days of the 20th Century with some of the first residents being Japanese farmers who, having finished their contracts to work on sugar plantations, set out on their own to grow vegetables on the rich volcanic soil. In the ensuing decades they were followed in waves by local businessmen from Hilo and Honolulu setting up second homes in the cool mountain air, artists and scientists attracted by the rich natural diversity of the area, those from the city seeking a quiet or alternative lifestyle, and many others who came for the isolation, beauty, or affordability and appreciated the joy of living in a forest setting on the slopes of one of the world’s most active volcanos. Most residents recognize three – or sometimes four – distinct residential areas that comprise about 78 square miles that more than 4,000 people call home today. There’s the “old village” on the mauka side of Highway 11, dating back to the turn of the 20th Century, the “new subdivisions,” first opened up for land buying in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the stand-alone 1970s-era golf course subdivision, about three miles down the road toward Kaʻu. For some, the fourth part of the village includes Kīlauea Volcano itself, Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, and its historic hotel, Volcano House. Without those links, the village itself would never have come into existence.