Meet the Producers
Meet the Producers
“As onion prices soared, farmers and customers soured, and the Market was established on August 17, 1907. The City Council granted space for a public produce market on Pike Place and a handful of farmers gathered at this very corner. Within a week, dozens more farmers joined them. Over time, the Market developed into a diverse community of immigrant and American-born farmers and merchants.
Prior to 1942, Japanese American farmers filled a majority of the stalls before their removal from Western Washington and incarceration during World War II. This forever altered the public market. The Song of the Earth mural, above the Market entrance to your right, was placed in their honor in 1998. Today, local farmers and craftspeople fill the Market arcades.
From its humble beginnings the Market grew into today’s 9-acre historic district, a neighborhood comprised of more than 30 buildings and public spaces.”
Learn More About This Time in Pike Place Market History
Before Pike Place Market’s mission of “Meet the Producer,” Seattle farmers were in a pickle. Selling their produce by way of middlemen, local farmers were barely breaking even. Increasingly, the middlemen were accused of unfair practices including conspiracy to artificially raise prices by hiding produce under floorboards. By 1907, the price of onions had jumped from 10 cents a pound to an entire dollar. For comparison, a person could buy a pair of shoes at Nordstrom in 1907 for $2. Hearing their outcry, one Seattle city councilman was up for the cause.
Council member Thomas Revelle sprang into action and discovered a never-before-used city ordinance that allowed the City of Seattle to set aside land for a public market. Seeing a convenient location close to the waterfront where ships and ferries delivered their goods, the hillside bluff between Western Avenue and 1st Avenue was selected as the site for the new public market. On August 5, 1907, the City Council passed Ordinance No. 27700 creating a farmers market on Pike Place.
With the Market established, a thriving community of farmers quickly took root. Japanese American farmers made up over 75% of the roughly 500 farmers selling at the Market in its early years. Despite racially charged practices that persisted into the 1920s, Japanese farmers fought to preserve their right to sell at the Market. They resisted pressure from the City Council that enforced a prejudicial lottery stall assignment system and attempts to pass selling restrictions on non-citizen farmers. Farmers continued to persevere despite this targeted discrimination and challenges of the Great Depression, until WWII arrived.
In 1942, the Market’s farm community was devastated when Executive Order 9066 forcibly detained nearly 15,000 citizens of Japanese descent in Washington state. In total, over 120,000 people across the West Coast were forced to abandon their homes, jobs, and land and incarcerated in internment camps around the country. Following the war, most never returned to the Market. Their contributions are memorialized in Aki Sogabe’s “Song of the Earth” mural mounted directly under the Farmers Market sign, which captures the legacy of those whom the Market’s farm community was built on.
