Wilburton

Rail and mill. Wilburton exists because of timber and the railroad. Logging began here in the 1890s, and the first sawmill was built in 1903 by George England and Manley Wilbur — the source of the name. The town of Wilburton was platted in 1904, the same year the Northern Pacific Railway completed a timber trestle across the valley as part of its Lake Washington Belt Line. From 1905 the Hewitt-Lea Lumber Company ran the logging and milling operation, with a spur that followed Kelsey Creek toward Lake Hills; the mill buildings stood near the base of the trestle, under what is now the I-405 overpass, supported by a town of more than 350 people. The mill closed in 1919 when the harvestable timber ran out, and by the end of the 1920s the mill and its structures were gone. Wilburton was annexed by Bellevue in 1967.

Farming, and what happened in 1942. After the clearing came farms. Japanese immigrants had been arriving in Bellevue since 1898, and by the 1920s Japanese American families were the backbone of the local agricultural economy — strawberries above all, grown on roughly 472 acres, alongside lettuce and other produce sold largely through Seattle's Pike Place Market. That crop is the reason the first Bellevue Strawberry Festival was held in 1925.

In the spring of 1942, under Executive Order 9066, about 60 Bellevue Japanese American families were forcibly removed from their homes and farms. Most were held first at the Pinedale Assembly Center north of Fresno, California — the temporary detention facility that took nearly all Japanese Americans removed from western Washington outside Seattle — and then incarcerated at the Tule Lake concentration camp. Anti-Japanese agitation in Bellevue predated the war, and local white leaders lobbied for removal. Some families returned afterwards and many did not; those who came back found burned buildings, fallow fields and signs telling them to leave. The suburb built here afterwards stands on that dispossession, and any honest account of Wilburton's farm history has to say so. The Eastside Heritage Center and Densho hold the primary records; we point to them rather than paraphrase the families' own accounts.

Auto Row. Post-war, the 116th Avenue NE frontage became Bellevue's auto strip — dealerships, body shops, parts counters and the service trades around them. Much has been redeveloped, but the pattern is still readable in the deep lots, wide curb cuts and surviving independent garages along 116th. It is why Wilburton reads as workaday next to Downtown's towers, and part of why the City's redevelopment plans for the area are as contested as they are.

Wilburton is not a destination strip and does not pretend to be. It is a neighborhood of parks on a hill, a freeway edge, a rail corridor becoming a trail, and a grocery-anchored commercial spine that serves the blocks around it. Visitors come for the Botanical Garden and, in December, for Garden d'Lights; the rest of the time the loudest thing here is traffic on NE 8th.

That is also the appeal. On the Wilburton Hill side you can walk from a formal display garden into 105 acres of sports fields and second-growth forest without crossing a road. A mile north, cranes are rebuilding the same neighborhood around a light-rail station. Few places in Bellevue let you see the old city and the next one in a single afternoon.