The new collaborative museum is highlighting one of the community’s lesser-known chapters: the Japanese farming families who lived, worked and built lives in the area before World War II

Cade Barker
The Reflector Newspaper

Ridgefield’s history includes more than the stories found in city buildings, churches and familiar landmarks.

A new collaborative museum is highlighting one of the community’s lesser-known chapters: the Japanese farming families who lived, worked and built lives in the area before World War II.

For Japanese farming families who helped build Ridgefield’s agricultural community, their history includes forced removal during the second World War.

That history is being brought to the forefront through the Ridgefield Multicultural Initiative’s portion of “Meeting History: Exploring Ridgefield’s Told and Untold Stories,” a collaborative museum created by Ridgefield residents in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States.

The exhibit, housed in the Greely Building at 304 Pioneer St., focuses in part on the Japanese farm families who lived and worked in the Ridgefield area before being removed from their homes during the war.

Megan Dudley, Ridgefield Multicultural Initiative president, helped develop the exhibit. She said Japanese farming history was the portion she worked on most extensively.

While researching census records to determine who the first people of color in Ridgefield were, Dudley said she found that Japanese farm families represented the first large group in the community that was neither Indigenous or white.

The families were involved in substantial strawberry farming operations, Dudley said, at a time when Ridgefield was still a much smaller community.

“They worked together to do the strawberry farming, like pretty major strawberry farming, where they were hiring, like, 1,000 workers,” she said.

The exhibit uses maps, census information, photographs and family histories to help tell the story of those families and where they lived throughout the area.

Dudley said the research also led to the discovery of the Kawamoto family, whose story became a significant part of the exhibit.

In 1925, Ichiro Kawamoto, a Ridgefield-area farmer, was hired as a foreman at a mill in Toledo, Oregon, and brought approximately 30 workers with him. Dudley said local opposition quickly grew in Toledo, with some residents arguing that the Japanese workers would hurt property values.

The workers arrived by train on a Friday. A community meeting was held the following day at a baseball field, Dudley said, before a mob chased the workers out of town Sunday.

“They went to Corvallis,” she said. “But people helped them to organize and to sue them because they violated their right to work.”

The workers ultimately won the lawsuit, Dudley said, establishing a legal precedent. The discovery was particularly meaningful because the Kawamoto family also had ties to Ridgefield.

The exhibit also explores how Japanese families were received within Ridgefield before the war. Newspaper records indicated some were active members of the community, participating in school activities, plays, sports and honor societies.

“It seems like they were pretty well, you know, supported by the community,” Dudley said. “We were curious about that.”

That sense of belonging was shattered by the forced removal of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The exhibit includes a reproduction of an actual exclusion order, maps showing the exclusion areas and recreated family identification tags that Japanese families were required to wear and attach to their luggage when they were sent to internment camps.

Dudley said her own family history also made the subject personal. Her grandparents met in one of the camps.

She interviewed descendants of Ridgefield-area families, including a family member who was born at the Tule Lake incarceration camp, and Kara Martin, a Battle Ground teacher whose great-grandparents were farmers in the Ridgefield area.

“It was really cool to trace the history, find the people, and hear the stories from them, too,” Dudley said.

The exhibit aims not only to preserve those stories but to help visitors understand more of the impact locally.

“I hope that people will have some empathy for it and through, like, learning about the families, be able to put themselves in their shoes a little bit,” Dudley said.

She pointed specifically to the young people who were sent to the camps.

“These kids, like the kids that were in high school, were citizens, and it didn’t matter,” she said.

For Dudley, documenting the history is also about helping current residents better understand the place they call home.

“I always think about, like, when you think about your home, understanding your home deeply helps you feel rooted,” she said. “And then also, like you were saying, some people don’t even know that this history happened.”

“Meeting History: Exploring Ridgefield’s Told and Untold Stories” will be open Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. through Aug. 30, with a final day during the Ridgefield Multicultural Festival on Saturday, Sept. 5.

The museum opened with a preview event on Friday, Aug. 21, featuring the Ne Plus Ultra Jazz Orchestra and a 1920s-style dance hall.

The collaborative exhibit includes contributions from the Ridgefield Multicultural Initiative, the community’s oldest churches, hunger-relief organizations, the Ridgefield Heritage Society, local government and Friends of the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge.

Dudley encouraged residents to visit the exhibit and learn from the work contributed by the community.

“I just hope people will come and see it, because it was a lot of hands, a lot of brains, a lot of effort to put it together,” she said.

More information is available at ridgefieldculture.org.

This report was first published by The Reflector Newspaper. Reporter Cade Barker can be reached at cade.barker@thereflector.com.