President Obama, child of Hawai'i, seems worlds away from the Rev. Daniel Dole, a stern and complicated Congregationalist minister from Maine. Yet something of the intellect, determination, energy and resilience that Dole demonstrated when he started the Punahou School, and tried to instill in his first students, echo as Barack Obama confronts our problems 170 years later.

Daniel and Emily Ballard Dole arrived in Honolulu in May 1841 after more than six months at sea — many had assumed that their ship had been lost. They were among the idealistic young people caught up in the missionary fervor sweeping New England at the time. Daniel had worked his way through Bowdoin College and both husband and wife had headed schools in Maine.

Each of the missionary couples who arrived with the Doles was urged — and refused — to take charge of the new school for missionary children to be built at Punahou, two miles out of town. Daniel and Emily finally agreed, though terribly disappointed to teach haole rather than Hawaiian children. They may have been misguided, but they had come to serve to the best of their ability.

Punahou opened a year later with 15 boys and girls, including nine boarders. Daniel painted the buildings, built walls, plowed fields, planted crops and led the pupils in raising their own food. He also did most of the teaching.

Emily nearly died giving birth to their first child weeks before the school opened, but helped with teaching, cooking and the care of the boarders. Two years later, overwhelmed and suffering from dysentery, she died at age 34 giving birth to their second child. Daniel was devastated but pressed on.

The school's strict academic curriculum was rounded out with science expeditions, music, debate, student newspapers, sports, swimming, hiking and physical labor. After the long school day ended, Daniel wrote poetry and composed the school song, tended his young son and edited a newspaper on child-rearing and education.

Running a school was no less political then than now. Some missionaries faulted Dole for falling short in the religious conversion of the pupils. Another parent criticized his "inability to interest and advance dull scholars" and concluded that his "lack of sympathy with childhood" made him unfit to be a teacher.

Finances were a constant struggle. In 1850, the fee for children under 10 was 37 cents a week-a large chunk of the $30 annual allowance given to missionary families per child, but still much less than it cost the school just to feed and house them. At times, everyone at Punahou went hungry.

Yet both female and male graduates consistently shone at the best colleges on the mainland. In the 1850s, Punahou alumni won Yale's First Astronomical Prize for three out of five years (astronomy was critical to navigation).

By 1854, now in his mid-40s, Daniel was considered elderly and old-fashioned. When Punahou was briefly turned into a college, the presidency was awarded to 27-year-old Edward Beckwith, a gifted teacher and also the son-in-law of Richard Armstrong, a prominent trustee.

Daniel soon left Punahou. He wrote dejectedly that even though the school had a reputation as superior to most of its peers in the U.S., some people had done "all they could do to increase the dissatisfaction" with him. He moved to Kaua'i, where he started another school and died 24 years later.

Daniel modestly wrote of his goals for the students, "Should any of them wish to become teachers, merchants, mechanics or farmers, we wish to give them in this school an education which will prepare them to be respectable and highly useful." Maybe it is not so surprising that a graduate of this school is making himself "highly useful" now as president of the United States.

This article is based on letters in the Honolulu Mission Children's Society, The ABCFM archives at Harvard University, family letters, and "Punahou 1841-1941" by Mary Charlotte Alexander and Charlotte Peabody Dodge. Jean Lawrence, an architect in Boston and a great-great-granddaughter of Daniel and Emily Dole, can be reached at jean.lawr@yahoo.com. She wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.