The Washington State Fair pulls in over a million people a year, and its fairgrounds once spent a summer as a WWII prison camp
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.
It grew fast. By 1919 attendance had hit 75,000, and by 1991 a record 1.4 million people showed up, making it the sixth-largest fair in the country that year.
The fair changed its name four times before settling on the Washington State Fair in 2013. Locals still just call it “the Puyallup,” and today it runs as a 20-day event each September across more than 160 acres — the biggest fair in the Pacific Northwest, and one of the largest anywhere.
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The summer the fairgrounds became a prison camp
In May 1942, a few months after Executive Order 9066, the federal government turned these same fairgrounds into the Puyallup Assembly Center, an incarceration site nicknamed “Camp Harmony.” Nearly 7,400 Japanese Americans from Western Washington and Alaska were held there before being shipped off to permanent camps like Minidoka in Idaho.
Conditions were brutal. Families were housed in horse stalls under the grandstand and the old wooden roller coaster, some with dirt floors that still smelled like the animals that had lived there before them.
The camp ran for about four months before the last detainees were transferred out that October. The fair doesn’t hide from that chapter anymore — a Remembrance Gallery opened inside the grandstand’s concessions area in 2024, with an illuminated wall listing more than 7,500 names of the people who were incarcerated there.
What you’re actually walking into this year
The 2026 Washington State Fair runs September 4 through September 27, right back on the same grounds in downtown Puyallup. Expect the usual mix — carnival rides, livestock barns, a full concert lineup in the grandstand, and the Puyallup Rodeo — plus whatever new deep-fried creation shows up this year.
The one food nobody skips is a Fisher Scone. Fairgoers have been eating them since 1915, and by the stand’s 100th anniversary in 2011, it had already served its 100 millionth scone — the recipe hasn’t changed since, and neither has the line.
Coming from outside Puyallup? The fairgrounds run their own on-site RV camping during fair season, worth booking early if you’d rather stay close than fight traffic home every night.
Trip tips: grab a rental car to get out here, lock in your hotel before the good rooms are gone, or skip both and book a camper van instead.
Rules and fees change — always confirm current requirements before you go.
