The Washington State Fair pulls in more than a million people every fall — the largest fair in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the biggest in the country. Before any of that, before the rides and the scones and the grandstand concerts, the same fairgrounds spent a summer in 1942 holding thousands of Japanese Americans as wartime prisoners.
That’s not a footnote tucked into a museum exhibit somewhere else. It happened on the same ground where you’ll grab your first corn dog this September, and the fair tells that story on purpose now, not by accident.
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From a vacant lot to the Northwest’s biggest fair
The fair started as the Valley Fair, a three-day event a group of Puyallup Valley farmers and business owners threw together in October 1900. It was held on a vacant lot near what’s now Pioneer Park, funded by selling shares of stock, with admission running a dollar a family for all three days…