Strawberry Festival Only Gets Sweeter at Quarter Century Mark

With 5,500 pounds of strawberries and a small pool's worth of whipped cream, the is getting ready to celebrate the 25th year of the annual Bellevue Strawberry Festival.

This year the festival will be June 25 and 26 at .

The free celebration, held every year in Bellevue since 1987 and sponsored by the EHC, will feature a full array of family entertainment such as mini-golf, bounce houses, rock climbing walls and a ubiquitous purple slide that was a highlight of last year's festival, according to festival coordinator Jennifer Heintz.

"Back in the day people came out for the entertainment and the strawberry shortcake," Eastside Heritage Center director Heather Trescases said. "Nowadays, we like to add more and more fun things to do every year … because people expect more."

The "back in the day" refers to the original inspiration of the Bellevue Strawberry Festival, dating back to 1920s era Bellevue, making the modern version a throwback to the city's rich history as an agricultural center, according to Trescases.

This festival is a revival of the city's historical '20s and '30s past. It's a way to celebrate Bellevue's history as a farming community, she said.

Until the EHC essentially revived the festival in 2003, the Bellevue Historical Society held a much smaller incarnation of the festival, as a strawberry social that attracted about 80 people, Trescases said.

The first year that the Eastside Heritage Center revived the festival as a community fair, about 1,500 attended the half-day event. Today, about 40,000 people attend over the weekend.

According to Heintz and Trescases, the objective of the festival is to showcase the Bellevue community and the "sense of place" that is produced when people come together to share history.

One of the new features added to this year's festival is a Journey Stories tent. Journey Stories, an exhibit of the Smithsonian that is currently being displayed at nearby shopping center, functions as a collector of personal background stories.

Volunteers are set up in the tent to hear tales of community members willing to share tales of their ethnic background or genealogy.

"One of our longer-term goals is to collect and tell the stories of individuals in our community," Trescases added. "Short of interviewing each person in the entire Bellevue area about their parents and grandparents, this exhibit is one of the best ways to accomplish that goal right now."

As the Eastside Heritage Center doesn't have a museum, Trescases says that elements of the festival such as the Journey Stories tent function very much the same way, turning the entire festival into a quasi-museum for the EHC.

Kids attending the festival likely won't have history on their minds; they'll be too busy with activities such as the shortcake eating competition or the dozens of vendors selling gifts.

The Bellevue Strawberry Festival is also an officially sanctioned Seattle Seafair event for the first time this year; a hydroplane will be on display to commemorate the partnership.

If you go

The Eastside Heritage Center's Strawberry Festival will be at , at the corner of Northeast 8th Street and 164th Avenue Northeast.

• June 25, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
• June 26, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.