Probably the most profitable historic recreation in Kailua, Kona, is a Portuguese oven. This Portuguese oven is the brainchild of one of Hawai'i's friskiest historic preservation organizations, the Kona Historical Society on the Big Island.

"A bunch of Kona cowboys volunteered to build us a Portuguese oven for our new Living Heritage Ranch," said the executive director, Jill Olson, a human Energizer battery. "The first time we baked bread, it sold as fast as we could take it out of the oven.

"Now we bake 64 loaves every Tuesday, and people drive from all over the island to buy bread. By 3 o'clock in the afternoon, it's gone."

The Portuguese oven is the first step in what is going to be a Living History Ranch. If the ranch is as successful as the Kona Historic Society's Living History Coffee Plantation, the society will be in clover. Plantation tours bring in $450,000 a year, adding a healthy boost to the society's $600,000 annual budget. Olson said the plantation sells coffee grown on the grounds.

The society started in 1975 when 25 Kona kama'ainas met in the old Greenwell Ranch store to save it. Olson said the store was built of stone in 1875 by Henry Greenwell, who served as harbor master, superintendent of schools and postmaster as well as the local storekeeper. So the store became a community center.

Greenwell spoke both Hawaiian and Portuguese with his workers. After riding horseback on the mountain all day, he taught his children Portuguese and Hawaiian. Eventually, the store became a ranch store and then closed. But Henry Greenwell's descendants, Sherwood Greenwell and Mrs. Norman Greenwell, wanted to preserve it.

The original 25 saw that much of Kona's history, as well as the store, was being lost, so the Kona Historical Society started. The coffee plantation came later, when the society took over an old Kona coffee farm. It has proved so profitable that the society is now building a Living History Ranch next door to the store.

Olson said another income producer has been Jeep tours that take visitors to places few people get to see like Umi's Temple, remote mauka dairies, Ho'okena, the Kapu'a holua slide and Kiholo. The staff has grown from one to 35.

The society's most recent venture is in historic drama. Jeeps took 40 people up Hualalai mountain to see an original one-woman production depicting Isabella Bird, the 19th-century English world traveler who once stayed in a cabin at the old 1872 sheep station.

The event was so successful that there will be another on Saturday for 75 people. If you can't make it, call (808) 323-3222 for the next round.

This year, the society is celebrating its 30th anniversary and by next January, the store will be restored, with costumed staff to tell its story.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.