Vashon Strawberry Festival

At three o’clock on the Friday of the third weekend in July, Vashon Highway closes to cars between 171st and 178th, and Bank Road between 97th and 100th Avenues. Traffic and the island buses are routed around the edge of town until six on Sunday evening, and 101 street vendors move into the empty lanes, sorted into zones lettered A through O. In 2026 the festival ran July 17 to 19. The Vashon Island Chamber of Commerce’s Strawberry Festival Planning Committee produced the stage, the parade, the vendor street and the kids’ Fun Zone. Island clubs, businesses and nonprofits supplied most of the rest.

Three days on Vashon Highway

The Main Stage stands in Ober Park. It opened at 4 p.m. that Friday with the Reptile Man, the zoologist Scott Petersen, and a collection of live reptiles. Cheap Scenery followed with old-school punk from the Clash, the Buzzcocks and Gang of Four. Next came the JD Hobson Band, with Ron Weinstein on Hammond B3 and Dan Infecto on stand-up bass. Publish the Quest, an island band of horns, funk and Afrobeat, closed the night. Nashi Orchards ran the Beverage Garden all weekend, with nonalcoholic drinks alongside the rest.

Saturday’s bill began at 11:45 a.m. with the Olatunji Legacy Afro-Jazz Ensemble, an 11-piece group built on djembe rhythms. Memphis Radio Kings, Stevie & the Blue Flames and Reposado, with what it calls “TequilaFunk,” followed. Hell’s Belles, an all-female AC/DC tribute, played at 8. Little Creatures played Talking Heads at 10. Sunday changed on the morning of the show: Great American Trainwreck canceled after a medical emergency, so One More Mile, a Vashon blues band led by the guitarist Jason Lollar, moved to 2 p.m. Loose Change, a 12-piece R&B and swing band, played at 4. By its own billing it ends every show with “Pink Cadillac,” for which all the ladies in the crowd are invited onstage.

At six on Saturday the music also spilled into the street. The Portage Fill Big Band played for dancing on the highway in front of Sporty’s Bar & Grill, south of Bank Road. The band has been part of the festival since 1973. It leans on Big Band tunes of the 1930s and ‘40s, with hot jazz from later decades, and the Chamber calls it “Vashon Island’s original ‘garage band.’”

The rest of the program runs on the side streets and in the parking lots. Friday evening, the Vashon Heritage Museum held its ice cream social on its back lawn, with the Lazy Dog String Band. Down the road, young island musicians played the Coop Youth Stage on the front porch of Pandora’s Box. Through the weekend, the Park District’s supporters sat over a dunk tank at the northwest corner of Bank Road and the highway. Children threw for speed at a radar pitch run by Vashon Youth Baseball & Softball at Camp Colvos Brewery. Young vendors kept a Kids Market in front of Vashon Pharmacy. At the library, the Seattle Area LEGO Users Group laid out a four-by-eight-foot LEGO map of Vashon that visitors could help build. A free festival train “chugs” between the US Bank lot and the Chamber lot across from Ober Park. The Bill Burby Run starts from the Harbor School at 8:30 Saturday morning. On Sunday, the Classic Car Parade & Show fills the Chamber of Commerce lot from 10 to 2. The Heritage Museum keeps its usual afternoon hours and advertised its air conditioning to anyone “looking for a cool place to sit down.” Businesses along the route set out water bowls for dogs, and Windermere Real Estate keeps a Mothers Room for infant care.

The food booths in 2026 included Lbee’s Filipino Deli, Iyad’s Syrian Grill, La Verdad Queso Tacos, Délicieux Crêpes, Thai-U-UP Thai Food and Da “Q” Shack. Mr. Twisdale’s Strawberry Soda poured the namesake fruit. The island historian Bruce Haulman has written that the Rotary Club’s strawberry shortcake booth imports its strawberries to the island.

Visitors come by ferry from Fauntleroy in West Seattle, from Southworth, or from Point Defiance in Tacoma. For the 2026 festival, King County Metro ran shuttles in Seattle to meet the passenger Water Taxi.

The parade and the Unofficial Mayor

The parade steps off at 10 on Saturday morning and runs up Vashon Highway from the Vashon Theatre to Ober Park. The Kids Parade goes first. Children line up at the Chevron at nine in costumes, on decorated bikes, scooters and wagons. The main parade forms south of Kathy’s Corner. In 2024, according to Windermere Vashon, it included the Thriftway Drill Team, Vintage Vashon Tractors and the Vashon Fire Department. The 2026 grand marshals were Yvonne Kuperberg, in the year of her 100th birthday, and Joe Okimoto. The Chamber chose them for their work keeping the stories of Mukai Farm & Garden alive, in the farm’s centennial year.

The Unofficial Mayor race runs alongside. Island 501(c)(3) organizations put up candidates, and ballot boxes go up around town. Each dollar donated counts as one vote. Voting closes at noon Saturday, and the winner is announced from the Main Stage at three. The 2025 winner was TK Rose, an eight-year-old dance student who ran for the Blue Heron Education Center’s scholarship fund because, as he put it, “Everyone should have the chance to dance.” The 2026 winner was Marshall the Strawberry, a costumed berry played by Cedar, Jasper, Sierra and Jonathan. Its votes went to Mukai Farm & Garden for restoring the Mukai Cold Process Fruit Barreling Plant.

Crates, flats and the barreling plant

One hundred years before Marshall’s term, the Mukai family farmed 100 acres of strawberries. They pioneered a cold-process method and shipped berries nationwide from the island’s first fruit barreling plant. Their farmstead, just west of the Vashon commercial core, dates to 1926.

Strawberries had been a commercial crop on Vashon since 1890. By 1901 the island shipped 15,000 crates, and by 1909, 120,000. Japanese American farmers, who appear on the island census from about 1900, favored the crop. By the 1930s the middle of the island was cleared so far that, as the farmer Bill Mann remembered, “[It was] one big berry and chicken farm.” The morning pick went into wooden flats and onto ferries bound for markets such as Seattle’s Pike Place. Later pickings went to the canners.

Before 1900, by Haulman’s account, festivals were held now and then in separate communities around the island. Vashon was still a set of water-based settlements with few roads between them. The Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber dates the first island-wide celebration, an Island Fair, to 1900. The Strawberry Festival name first appeared in 1909, and a history on vashon-maury.com credits the Vashon Island Commercial Club with organizing it. Haulman complicates the date. The festival became annual only in 1912, under the Vashon Federation of Clubs. A 1923 festival at Ellisport, which drew more than 2,500 people, was billed as the fifth annual, which would put the first annual festival in 1919. In one essay he counted the coming festival as “either the 104th or the 101st or the 94th,” depending on the reader’s preference for first dates. Bellevue, Burien, Burlington, Marysville and Richmond Beach began strawberry festivals at about the same time.

In 1923 Melissa Jaynes, 101 years old, was crowned the first Strawberry Queen. The title later became Miss Vashon, and the last Miss Vashon was chosen in 1972. In the 1920s tables were set for the festival at Burton. In 1926 it moved to Vashon town, where it has stayed. The one exception came in the early 1950s, when the parade ran north to south and ended at Vashon High School.

Japanese American families took part in the festivals from 1909. They held picnics, dances and funerals at the Island Club in Vashon town. In May 1942 the Island Club became their registration point. Families walked there carrying a suitcase or two each, then left the island by ferry for incarceration camps. About a third of the 140 came back after the war. The Island Club site is now Ober Park, five and a half acres with a library, a playground and a memorial sculpture, and it is where the Main Stage stands. In 1949 the Mukai family’s Vashon Island Packing Company entered a float in the festival parade.

Peaches, a harvest and the Jaycees

The festival was canceled during World War I, when workers were needed in the fields, according to the Beachcomber. It was suspended again during World War II. Its postwar names come down in two versions. The Beachcomber gives the Peach Festival in 1947 and 1948, the Harvest Festival from 1949 to 1952, and the Vashon Island Festival from 1953 to 1979. A brief run as “Strawberries Forever” followed in the early 1980s, and the Strawberry Festival name returned in 1983. Haulman has the festival restarting in 1946 as the Peach Festival, ended by peach blight in 1948 and 1949. It became the Vashon Festival in 1949, the Harvest Festival in 1951, and the Island Festival from 1952. In his account the Strawberry Festival name returned in 1984.

In 1958, Haulman writes, the Chamber of Commerce was ready to drop the festival for “lack of enthusiasm.” The Jaycees took it on instead. The Beachcomber, citing Haulman’s records, reports that it was abandoned from 1959 to 1962 because there was “no one to organize it.” Over the years its sponsors have included the Vashon-Maury Federation Club, the Commercial Club, the Grange, the Jaycees, Allied Arts and the Chamber. Commercial strawberry farming on the island collapsed by the early 1980s, under competition from California berries, changing labor laws for pickers and the retirement of older farmers.

In October 2025 the Chamber board voted unanimously to turn its attention toward member support and business advocacy. In April 2026 its president, Elijah Berry, told the Beachcomber that the Chamber would run the 2026 festival as usual. After that season it hoped to see a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit take on the festival, one that could accept tax-deductible gifts. “The festival is an incredible asset to the island, and it deserves a team whose sole focus is bringing it to life,” Berry said. “We just want to shift from being the sole driver to being a dedicated, supporting partner.”