Rhubarb Days

Main Street in June

For one weekend each June, Main Street, Cherry Avenue and Kincaid Avenue in Sumner close to traffic. Into the closed blocks go more than 200 vendor booths, more than a dozen food trucks, a kids zone and two music stages. Sumner lies 33 miles south of Seattle. Admission is free, and the fair runs rain or shine. The organizers explain: “Here in the Pacific Northwest, the show must go on!”

Rhubarb turns up in every form the fair can manage. There is pie and crisp, freshly cut stalks to carry home, and a rhubarb-infused IPA poured in the beer garden. The vendor market mixes handcrafted goods with the stock of downtown’s own shops, and the kids zone opens with it at ten in the morning. At noon the beer garden opens beside the Main Stage, which stands in Reuben A. Knoblauch Heritage Park on Kincaid Avenue. The most recent opening ceremony there brought out Mayor Carla Bowman, the Sumner High School Band and a flag presentation by the Sumner-Bonney Lake VFW.

The 2026 festival, held June 20 and 21, put eight acts on the Main Stage. Saturday ran from the Brittany Danielle Band’s new folk and soul at noon to Cory Wilds’s classic rock at 6:30 that evening. Sunday brought country blues, R&B and the “original glam-folk” of Champagne Sunday. A second Artist Stage ran sets about every hour from 11 a.m. on both days. Rob Tudor opened the Main Stage at noon Sunday with his band, the Holy Grail, and was back on the Artist Stage at 2:45.

Sumner Main Street Association runs the fair in partnership with the City of Sumner, and Knutson Farms is the presenting sponsor. The city calls the fair “the fastest growing festival in the Pacific Northwest,” and the town the Rhubarb Pie Capital of the World. The next edition is set for June 19 and 20, 2027.

Pie from Knutson’s fields

The pie travels a short way. In 2024, Carmen Palmer, the city’s communications director, told South Sound magazine that the festival’s rhubarb “is going to be pulled from Knutson’s fields.” The pies are baked at nearby Farm 12 and brought back to Main Street to be sold by the slice. “It’s not something someone can go get out of a freezer in their hometown,” Palmer said. “They’ve got to come to Sumner to experience that.”

The same magazine found rhubarb in downtown kitchens before and after the fair. Craft.19 Espresso & Creperie filled its SumnertownUSA crepe with strawberry and rhubarb. Main Street Dairy Freeze made rhubarb milkshakes, and The Secret Garden Tea Room served scones with Sumner Valley rhubarb pie tea. The Sumner Café & Catering advertised its rhubarb crumble with giant red arrows on a street sandwich board, and served it warm under cinnamon granola, à la mode.

Knutson Farms was founded in 1939 by Roger Knutson’s parents, who had come west from South Dakota to escape the Dust Bowl. When he was born, the farm’s main crop was daffodil, tulip and iris bulbs. His earliest farm memories go back to about the first grade, walking out to catch the school bus: “they were plowing out rhubarb … I hated going to school; I wanted to go out and ride on the tractor.”

In 2024, at 79, Knutson still worked a few hours a day in a black Western hat, plaid shirt and cowboy boots. His son-in-law, Brian Anderson, had largely taken over the farm and added a flower and gift shop, an event venue and a coffee truck. By Knutson’s estimate, close to 75 percent of the farm’s wholesale output is rhubarb, and most of the rest is greenhouse tulips bound for Costco. He remembered the valley in his parents’ day: “You could drive around the valley and on a still day like this — there’s no wind — and you’d see smoke curling up all over. These fires would be burning and there were a whole lot of rhubarb sheds, and they’re small sheds.” Today’s hothouses are big enough to drive a full-size pickup into.

Smoke from a root shack

The sheds trace back to the Knoblauch family. In 1893, Adam Knoblauch shipped the first field rhubarb to Seattle in gunny sacks. One day his son Henry was going down the road and saw smoke rising from the root shack of an old German farmer named Bill Dodson. He wondered whether Dodson was smoking salmon. Dodson was forcing rhubarb, growing it in a hothouse so the plant comes up in the colder months, ahead of spring-market competitors.

Henry went home and built a 12-by-24-foot hothouse on his farm on Wahl Road. In 1914 he put roots in, cut them up and sold the first commercial hothouse rhubarb in the Sumner area. His brother Albert delivered it to Tacoma and Seattle in a Model T Ford. In the version Palmer heard from the family, the Model T carried it up to Pike Place Market. Other early growers included Charles Orton, Jacob Stelling, Warren and Charles Ryan, Fred Mattson, J.A. Forehand and Bill McClane. The Leslie Brothers started their rhubarb farm in the valley in 1919.

Palmer gathered much of this history for the city’s website, rhubarbpiecapital.com, from Hazel Knoblauch Freehe, a rhubarb farmer of Knoblauch Farms, before Freehe died in May 2011. “(It was) huge history, and it’s like, ‘Well, we can’t lose this,’” Palmer said. In the city archives she also found why early-twentieth-century farmers had turned to rhubarb at all. The valley had first been built on hops. “A lot of the biggest houses in Sumner were built on the hops boom, and then there was a blight in the soil,” she said. She found the minutes of an emergency meeting where the farmers talked over what the soil should be good for: berries, daffodils and rhubarb. The valley, she noted with a laugh, is still known for those three.

A man on the road

For many years two growers’ associations handled the crop. Puget Sound Vegetable Growers organized as a cooperative in 1924, with rhubarb among its major products. A second group, started in 1926, reorganized in 1930 as the Sumner Rhubarb Growers Association, with Fred Mattson as manager and Bill McClane as secretary. In 1937, Henry Knoblauch went on a sales trip all over the country. At the Kansas State Fair he passed out pamphlets encouraging Sumner rhubarb.

Many of the valley’s farmers in the 1900s were of Japanese descent, and during World War II several were sent to internment camps. Their neighbors rented out their farms and kept them going in their absence. Some families did not return after the war, but many came back to take up their farms again. From then on, farmers of Japanese heritage took their rhubarb to the Puget Sound Vegetable Growers.

Amiel Goettsch took over as manager of the Sumner Rhubarb Growers in 1948, but he refused to travel, and the farmers knew they needed a man on the road. In 1954, Henry’s son Clayton and his wife Hazel came back to the family farm and built two new hothouses. Hothouses had traditionally been 20 to 24 feet wide and heated by wood-burning pot-bellied stoves. The Knoblauchs built theirs 60 feet wide and 100 to 110 feet long, with furnaces.

Clayton and Hazel, along with George Richter of Puyallup and his wife, then went all over Washington and into Idaho looking for a salesman. Richter was big in field rhubarb and had promoted his own crops on the road. The recruiters talked to men in Safeway produce departments, but none wanted to leave a stable job. At last Clayton told George he should do it. George turned his farm over to his son Ed and worked promotion for Sumner Rhubarb in 1956 and 1957.

In 1957 the two associations combined their promotion and marketing as the Washington Rhubarb Growers, though they kept separate books and organizations for years. By the late 1960s or early 1970s, the Sumner growers hosted the American Rhubarb Growers in Puyallup. Clayton was president of the Sumner group from 1963 until his death in 1965. In 1966 Hazel, by then running 14 hothouses, went to work for the Sumner Rhubarb Growers.

The associations merged completely in late 1974 as the Washington Rhubarb Growers Association. Fewer than 60 Puget Sound growers remained, most of them growing rhubarb. Min Terada had managed them since 1958, under a board led by Tom Shigeo. The Sumner side counted 37 active members and 50 capital stockholders. Hazel set up the books for the combined association before she retired in July 1975, and at the end of that year Dick Craig, trained for the job, took over as manager.

The association is down to a handful of farmers now, and the rhubarb leaves by truck instead of train. The city’s history page says most of the country’s rhubarb is still grown around Sumner in the Puyallup Valley. Sumner’s own figure, reported in 2024, is close to 30 percent, much of it from three farms: Sterino Farms, Richter Family Farms and Knutson Farms. The Leslie farm of 1919 passed from John Leslie to his son Allen and daughter-in-law Winona, then to their son Ron. Ron now farms it with his son Nik, as Leslie & Son.