Bellevue's Strawberry Fields and the Strawberry Festival

By the 1920s, Bellevue was well known for its strawberries. They were a chief crop of many families, most of them Japanese. One night in 1925, according to HistoryLink, Mrs. Charles Bovee dreamed of a celebration of the strawberry harvest. She told her husband, a local realtor who later became Bellevue's first mayor, and he thought it was a great idea. A committee raised $40, and in mid-June 1925 the first Bellevue Strawberry Festival was held behind the Main Street school. It drew 3,000 visitors. [1]

Japanese immigrants had first been recruited to clear the logged-off stump land for farming, a dangerous and back-breaking job, and some stayed to farm it themselves. They brought intensive farming methods from Japan and built multi-crop truck farms and, especially, berry fields. At first the crop was ferried across the lake to markets in Seattle. Later, refrigerated train cars carried berries east. In 1932 a group of Japanese farmers formed the Bellevue Vegetable Growers Association, bought a rail car that could be kept cold with ice-chip insulation, and set up a warehouse beside a Northern Pacific siding near Lake Bellevue. [2]

The festival grew into an annual three-day event. People came for shortcake drenched in strawberries and cream, and for skits and acts on stage, and car caravans came from nearby towns, Kirkland among them, as a show of neighborly support. One year a group of Kirkland businessmen staged a mock revival meeting: a man on crutches was 'healed' and danced, and a man with a very large 'tumor' on his side had it cut open to reveal a fiddle, which he then played. In 1935 more than 15,000 people came, nearly five times the number who lived in the town. [1]

The festival ended in 1942. That year, following the onset of World War II, 55 local Japanese families were forced to go to internment camps. Japanese farmers then grew most of Bellevue's strawberries, on 472 acres. When the war ended, very few of the families returned. By then much of the farmland had become too valuable for growing berries, and it was used for homes and businesses instead. [1]

In 1987 the Bellevue Historical Society revived the Strawberry Festival to honor the city's past, and it has once again become an annual tradition. [1]