10/05/2026
During this week in Washington (Oct. 4-6, 1900) farmers and business people “did the Puyallup” for the first time. Eager to promote their crops and businesses, promoters launched the Valley Fair, later called the Puyallup Fair and now the Washington State Fair.
Over the next 125 years, it would grow into one of the largest state fairs in the country.
For seventeen days every September, fairgoers “Do the Puyallup,” a jingle created by the advertising firm Cole & Weber in 1976. The fair has grown far beyond its agricultural roots. Today visitors attend live concerts, flock to thrill rides, dally in “Sillyville, and gorge themselves on Fischer Scones. By the 1990s, annual attendance exceeded one million.
The fairgrounds experienced dark days when it closed during World War II. In 1942, it temporarily housed 7,390 Japanese Americans headed for internment camps in Idaho, California and Wyoming. Surrounded by barbed wire fences, armed guards and searchlights, internees lived in squalor for months in what was ironically called “Camp Harmony.”
The fair survived the war and reopened in 1946. Today, it is the largest fair in the Pacific Northwest and annually among the top ten nationwide.
Post written courtesy of David J Jepsen - Historian
A photographic print from the WSHS collection. Scene of the amusement park area at the Washington State Fair, in Puyallup, WA. Creation date 1940. Catalog ID: 2001.1.35.
