World War I - 1938


[World War I (1914) - 1938]

The City of Medina area, west of downtown Bellevue was originally platted in 1914.

|
World War I starts in 1914. 
|
Demands for lumber during WWI led to a substantial increase in the 
Pacific Northwest lumber business.
|
|
New Medina ferry dock, May 30, 1914
|
|
In 1914 a road connecting Bellevue to Redmond on 120th Avenue Northeast is built.

Medina ~1915

|

In 1915, electric lights come to Bellevue thanks to the power by
Puget Sound Power and Light in by Snoqualmie Falls. 
Cedar Falls first generated power in 1905 under control of the Seattle City Water Department,
but the plant performed well and demand for municipal power increased.
On April 1, 1910, Seattle City Light was born.

|


Legh (Leigh) Richmond Freeman Sr, father of Legh Miller Freeman, 
dies Feb 7th 1915 in Yakima County, WA and is buried in Tahoma Cemetery

|

1916:
196 students enrolled in Bellevue area schools.
Bussing begins.
Sam Sharpe was hired by the school district
to use his own 1914 Studebaker
 as a bus for Wilburton students.
His 14 year old son, Andy, drove the bus

|

In 1916, the Boeing Company was first started, 

William Edward Boeing

when American lumber industrialist William E. Boeing 
founded Aero Products Company in Seattle, Washington. 

|
| 
Miller Freeman Sr, Founder and Commanding Officer,
Naval Training Camp, Seattle
World War 1: August 2, 1917 - January 6, 1919
In 1916, Miller Freeman Sr, father of F. Kemper Freeman Sr. and 
grandfather of Kemper Freeman Jr., founded the Anti-Japanese League of Washington.

Miller Freeman Sr denied his campaign was driven by racial animus, saying he “harbors no enmity toward the Japanese. They are a wonderfully bright people, frugal and industrious. But they are Orientals. We are Caucasians. Oil and water do not mix.” Over the ensuing decades, that became Freeman’s motto.

|
|
A Clyde Hill strawberry and produce farm operated by a Japanese family in about 1916.
|
|
|||
|||
On Oct. 20 1019 a Bellevue newspaper headline read
“Everybody is Laid Up with the Spanish Influenza.”

Bellevue residents took precautions to prevent the spread of the disease:
public gatherings were cancelled, residents were encouraged to stay at home,
and hundreds of gauze masks were fashioned and distributed by local charities.
 |
Left Photo: Employees of Stewart & Holmes Wholesale Drug Co. 3rd Ave Seattle, during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Right: Seattle Police, December 1918 National Archives (Record No. 165-WW-269B-25)
|



At least 11 Bellevue residents died of the flu. The flu was responsible for 1,600 deaths in the greater Seattle area, 700,000 in the United States, and 21 million worldwide.
||||
|||
|
World War I ends in 1918
|
|
1918 : M. Frank Odle takes the job in Bellevue as Superintendent, High
School Principal (only 9th and 10th grades), Teacher and coach.
|
|
Leaving Kumamoto-ken, a province on one of Japan’s most southern islands, Mr. (Guy) and Mrs. Matsuoka brought their two sons, Takeo (Tom) and Yoshio (John) to Washington state in 1919 after briefly living in Hawaii.
|
|
|
1919: School Board decided the bussing operation was too expensive,
so they closed the Wilburton School to save money.
The money saved was used to buy coal for the Main Street School.
|

In decade of the 1920's the Bellevue Population reaches ~2,500+. 
|
Medina became known as the "Gold Coast"

|

January 1920, three elm trees were planted by the Bellevue Minute Women,
in front of the grade school in memory of 3 Bellevue men who lost their lives in WWI.
(Victor Freed, Victor Hanson, and Oscar Johnson). 

The area is now part of the Downtown Park. 

In 2007, one elm tree was cut down due to wind storm damage and health of the tree.
Another tree replaced it and wood from the original tree will be made into a bench.

|

    March 8, 1921, Washington Governor Louis F. Hart (1862-1929) 
signs the Washington Alien Land Law is enacted,
essentially forbidding Japanese from owning land. 
Many immigrants cleared stumps, brush and trees in exchange for use/rental of land. 

|

In 1921 Wilburton Hill was purchased by Mr. and Mrs. Duey.
The land was first farmed by the Duey family in the 1920s and 1930s.

 Duey’s first barn before 1933 fire.

 William Duey worked on a farm in Skagit Valley.
When he heard about land available for rent in what is now Bellevue, he moved with his wife and three children in 1921 to start their own dairy on 190 acres,
all but 5 acres un-cleared and stump-covered from logging activity.

The Duey's cleared the stumps, built a barn for a herd of dairy cows,
and began delivering to Eastside residents milk, cream and home-churned butter,
stamped with the farm's name - Twin Valley Farm. 

|

By the 1920s, Edward Tremper owned the largest holly farm
 in the United States on Yarrow Point. 
Farmers of Japanese descent came to work for Tremper and leased land
where they grew strawberries and vegetables. 

Japanese farming strawberries and vegetables, Yarrow Point, 1920s
Many early farmers were Japanese, but anti-alien legislation in the 1920s prohibited most of them from leasing land; many moved away even before WWII internment began.

|

Mitsuko “Mitzie” Hashiguchi (nee Takeshita)  was born in 1921,
the daughter of Japanese immigrants.
She grew up on a strawberry and vegetable farm in
the Midlakes area of Bellevue.

In 1939 Mitzie married a Seattle man, Mutsuo Hashiguchi.
When all local Japanese Americans were interned in 1942,
Mitzie, her husband and son were relocated to Pinedale, California,
then Tule Lake and Minidoka, Idaho.
After their return to a devastated farm in Bellevue,
they rebuilt the farm while Mutsuo also worked a second job at Boeing. 

Mitzie began work as a food server for the Bellevue School District in 1955,
eventually attaining 26 years of service

|

A crew of Japanese strawberry pickers at the Numoto farm near Bellevue, Washington, around 1922

|
|||

Thomas Lane Dabney died age 75 on March 23rd 1923 in California
 His wife and a child died unexpectedly in 1900-1903.

|||
||
|

1923, Union S School District was organized.
The Main Street School became a four-year accredited high school. 
Leonora Brys, Paul Hunter and Lillian Peterson were the first graduates
 of the new four year accredited high school. 

|
The first Bellevue High School Annual is produced
as part of the REFLECTOR.

|

In 1924 Hewitt-Lea Company sought $125,000 in damages because
the opening of the Lake Washington Ship Canal in 1916 put the company out of the business by lowering the lake level.

|

    In 1925, the first annual Strawberry Festival was held behind the Main Street School. 
The Eastside was already famous for growing the finest strawberries,
the chief crop of many Japanese-American farmers.

Strawberry Festival "Princess" Glenna Osborn, 
"Queen" Patty Smith and 
"Princess" Marguerite Siemon 
celebrate the Strawberry Festival
|
|
||

Miller Freeman Sr. stayed active in state politics as a
 driving force in anti-Japanese discrimination, agitating
for what he called a "white man's Pacific coast",  
and was a vocal proponent for Washington State's 1921 Alien Land Laws,
the 1924 Immigration Act -- and soon to come, the 1942 incarceration of Japanese in America.
    Miller Freeman Sr and family also moved in ~1925-1928 

Miller Freeman Sr and family

|

November 11th 1926, Armistice Day, a new stone monument was dedicated
 (as a flagpole base) in memory of three Bellevue men who died in World War I. 
Located then near the front of the grade school building
with the three elm trees that were planted in 1920,
today the school and flagpole are gone;
the memorial tablet and elm trees remain in the Downtown Park.
(“1914-1918 Lest We Forget” is written with three names.)

|

Andrew Balatico was born November 10, 1906 in the Philippines,
 immigrating to Bellevue, WA in 1926. 

In the late 1930s Balatico bought three acres of land on Bellevue Way. 

He worked to clear the land, and the next summer
planted two acres of strawberries and one acre of peas. 

Andrew's brother Marc came to visit from Montana and stayed to help him clear 15 more acres of rented land. Their hard work paid off, and by the 1960s Andrew Balatico was growing corn and pumpkins and running a prosperous vegetable stand.

|
|

November 1926, Tom Takeo Matsuoka and Kazue Hirotaka get married in front of family members.

|
|

In 1927 Sidonia Furth Wetherill, daughter of Jacob and Lucy Furth,
and her husband, Army Colonel Wetherill,
took over the Furth estate on Yarrow Point called "Barnabee",
after a famous Shakespearean actor.
Sisters Marjorie and Sidonia loved going there for summer vacations. 

|
|
|||


Tom (Takeo) Matsuoka and his sons, Ty and Tats, outside of the Bellevue Vegetable Growers Association shed, a farmer run organization which Tom helped create in the 1930s.

In 1927, Takeo was also a crucial organizer of the Seinenkai (Youth Club) 
for the young men who were growing up in Bellevue so that they would have a place to gather. 
He was also among the group that built the Kokaido (Club House), completed in 1930 where men came together as a community for recreation and to celebrate their cultural heritage

|

 In 1928, Bellevue Way (then Lincoln Avenue) is paved from
Main Street to Northeast Eighth Street and opened as a county arterial. 
|

1930, Union S High School was opened on 102nd Avenue N.E. between .E. 1st and N.E. 4th.
It was called Bellevue High School and later called Overlake High School.
(After the new high school on the hill was opened in 1949, the Union S. building became part of Bellevue Junior High.)

|
||
|||

  The Great Depression (https://depts.washington.edu/depress/) was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place mostly during the 1930s, beginning in the United States.
Nine states had work ban laws prior to the Depression and by 1940,
26 states restricted married women’s employment in state government jobs.

|
|

During the Depression, the Dueys sold the Wilburton Hill farm land to the Haller family but continued operating the dairy until it was purchased in 1942 by Mr. John Michaels.

William and Pearl Duey in front of their milk truck, c. 1930s.

|
|

    In 1929 the  Frederick W. Winters House on the west side of present-day Mercer Slough Nature Park was built for $32,000 by Frederick and Cecilia Winters.

|||
||
|

Charles P. LeWarne was born August 16, 1930 in Bellevue.
His father Charles T. LeWarne was a resident of Bellevue for 51 years
and was a Bellevue postmaster. 

Charles authored several books and wrote about the Love Israel Family commune,
which had its start on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill in 1968.

|
|

The annual Bellevue Strawberry Festival  returned in 1931 and for the first year there was a Strawberry Queen, Miss May Carter Stewart. The ‘Royalty’ tradition continued each year after that.

|

 From left to right: 
Guy Matsuoka, Betty Sakaguchi, Mitsi (Shiraishi) Kawaguchi, 
Mrs. Kazue Matsuoka, Yuri Yamaguchi
4th of July in 1932; from Bellevue on their way
to a Seattle baseball game at Columbia Playfield.

|

Kazuko Masunaga was born Marie Kazuko Sakata in Seattle WA on July 3rd, 1932. 
She was born the youngest of five siblings. 

|
|

From 1934 to 1942, at the old Thode cabin near Phantom Lake in east Bellevue.
with parents and two older sisters, Mary and Fumiye, 
Yeizo Masunaga raised peas on the surrounding peat soil 
 
"We used to work in the fields before we went to school at
Phantom Lake Grade School, and after school we'd work again until dark."  

|

The Suguro farm was located in the Midlakes area of Bellevue, Washington.
Front (left to right): Sumie and Toshi Suguro.
Back: Mae Suguro, Eva Aramaki, and Mitsue Suguro. (c. 1933)
|

Isabelle Bechtel continued to live in Bellevue, and passed away in 1938. 
A 1929 history of King County mentioned at the time of printing Isabelle
was "a great-grandmother, and highly esteemed by all who knew her."
|

In 1938, approximately 15,000 people attended
the Bellevue Strawberry festival,
consuming a total of
4,172 lbs of strawberries,
69 gallons of whipping cream,
100 gallons of ice cream,
and 8750 shortcakes.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)