William Northey Hooper (1809–1878) was born in Manchester, Massachusetts to the Massachusetts Hooper family of shipmasters and merchants. In 1835, with two other investors, he founded and operated Ladd & Co., which operated the Old Sugar Mill of Koloa, the first large scale sugar producer in Hawaii. It marked the birth of what became Hawaii's leading agricultural industry for over 150 years. Hooper later served as Consul to the Kingdom of Hawaii,[1] and was a founder of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce.