Islanders on Sept. 18 celebrated the transfer of the Mukai Farm & Garden Fruit Barreling Plant to the Friends of Mukai — the last major hurdle in the long-awaited quest by the nonprofit to restore the historic barreling plant to public use.

The transfer, a celebration of the chance to preserve and restore part of the island’s history, also represents an opportunity for Vashon to become more self-reliant and resilient.

A crowd of islanders gathered at the historic farm and garden last week to celebrate the accomplishment.

The unanimously-passed county legislation, which Vashon’s council member Teresa Mosqueda co-sponsored with council member Girmay Zahilay, officially transfers land containing the barreling plant from the county to Friends of Mukai. Doing so was crucial for the organization to proceed with its work on the plant.

Friends of Mukai eight years ago acquired the Mukai house and garden property, and restored the exterior of the house to resemble its appearance in B.D. Mukai’s time, along with the fields and garden at the property.

It was also when they started “an aggressive campaign” to put Mukai Farm & Garden on the map — to make sure that people in Seattle, King County and Tacoma knew “that we’re even here,” Friends of Mukai co-president Kay Longhi said.

“Practically nobody knew about this historic, significant property, and besides telling the inspiring story of the B.D. Mukai family, we made sure to tell the story of all the Japanese-American immigrants on the island,” Longhi said. “And we’re about to start on another amazing project.”

A long road

Getting to this point has taken years of work lobbying the county and jousting for grants.

The fruit barreling plant was originally used by the Mukai family to process and pack their strawberry harvest.

“This was the first building in the state to be called a fruit barreling plant, and it enabled Mr. Mukai to get his strawberries immediately across the country in refrigerated cars, without having to go through the wholesalers in Seattle,” Longhi said.

But after the conclusion of World War II, the economics of the strawberry business changed, and the property changed hands several times throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

The house and garden property was bought by Island Landmarks in 2000, and local organizations and civic leaders joined together in 2013 for a “This Place Matters” event at the farm and garden, which at the time had been listed on the state’s “most endangered properties” list.

“That was really to help us focus our advocacy efforts in supporting Mukai … to preserve and rehabilitate and reopen this complex to the public, to share this really important story,” King County Historic Preservation Officer Jennifer Meisner told the crowd last week.

The Friends of Mukai finally gained control of the property in 2016 after a legal battle with Island Landmarks, launching a project to revitalize and restore the ailing property. But the fruit barreling plant, located on a separate parcel, remained in private ownership and “was being misused and (was) deteriorating,” Meisner said.

“So in 2017, thanks to the relentless urging of the Friends, King County stepped in to acquire this property in a very complicated deal,” Meisner said, “and [used] all of the proceeds from that sale, combined with a state grant and contributions from the Friends to begin stabilizing this property.”

Meisner thanked islander and former county natural resources director Christie True, county executive Dow Constantine and former council member Joe McDermott for their advocacy on that complicated project.

“They understood that preserving and reopening the barreling plant was really essential to telling the full story of this place,” Meisner said.

She thanked the many volunteers who have helped rehab the plant — not an easy feat for a historic building owned by a government agency, she pointed out.

“Even though we [are] no longer going to own it, we want to keep supporting it and helping it move forward,” Meisner said.

That’s just the property ownership side, though, and the barreling plant project won’t be cheap.

The restoration project received a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities last year.

And just this month, the National Park Service, part of the Department of the Interior, finalized its award of $500,000 for the Barreling Plant restoration. The federal allocation is funded in part by the “Save America’s Treasures” grant program, through the Historic Preservation Fund.

The Friends of Mukai thanked Vashon’s representative in Congress, Pramila Jayapal, for securing that funding for the project.

The Friends also received $871,000 from the State Historical Society’s Heritage Capital Project fund. The Project Advisory Panel ranked 41 project proposals, and Mukai’s Barreling Plant project was the highest ranked of all — an endorsement of the value and need of the project. (The grant requires a two-to-one match, meaning Friends of Mukai raised double the amount just to apply.)

(You can see the rankings at washingtonhistory.org/across-washington/grants/heritage-capital-projects/public-meeting.) The Panel’s recommendation will now go to the Governor for inclusion in his budget for the upcoming legislative session.

With funding secured and the property finally in hand, full restoration of the barreling plant is now on track to occur next year.

Lynn Greiner, a founder of Friends of Mukai, leader on the barreling plant project and grant writer, said at the ceremony that across more than 100 meetings and years spent facilitating the deal, King County has been a great partner.

“We’re hopefully going to start construction next May,” Greiner said.

Restoration and community

The restored fruit barreling plant will return the historic, 98-year-old Mukai agricultural building to its original use: Food processing and preservation.

Farmers and other food and agricultural workers will have a shared space in the food hub to process and preserve food. It’s the fulfillment of a dream to create an island food hub that the Vashon Island Growers Association (VIGA) has held for more than 15 years.

The Mukai plant was a good fit: Friends of Mukai, the nonprofit that operates the Mukai Farm and Garden, had also planned for years to restore the building for public usage.

When restored, the plant will feature five tenant spaces. VIGA’s food hub will live in one, and other tenants — from bakers to fermented food producers — will come to occupy the other four. The building will also feature interpretive and historical materials to educate visitors, Longhi said.

The food hub will include a commercial kitchen with commercial ranges, convection ovens, processing equipment, freeze dryers, dry and cold storage; inside event spaces for workshops, meetings, markets and dinners; and agricultural tool library and grain mill; and cold and dry storage for crops, bulk produce, meat, animal feed and seeds.

For VIGA’s dozens of farms and hundreds of home food growers, it represents an opportunity to boost sales, locally grown food and improve access to commercial kitchens on the island.

But in a broader sense, VIGA Development Director Terah Ratheheart said, the barreling plant project and food hub also represent profound opportunities to reduce food insecurity, boost the island economy and make Vashon more environmentally sustainable.

“A facility like this has been a dream for many years, but until our partnership with Mukai, it just has never been possible,” Ratheheart said.

Commercial kitchen space on Vashon is extremely limited, Ratheheart said, and the plant will give growers and businesses more opportunities to process, expand and distribute. Being able to process grain locally is “huge” too, she said.

And the project will make Vashon more resilient in the face of emergencies and climate change, she said.

“We can already see a lot of our infrastructure crumbling — like our ferry systems … We need to start putting these systems into place now, while things are still okay, so we’re not reacting to emergency situations. … What happens when we don’t have access off-island for weeks at a time? When we can’t import produce? Are we producing enough here? … We have to figure out a way to do it ourselves.”

Council member Mosqueda said during the ceremony that the project is also part of a chance to address historic wrongs. And it’s a continuation of the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit that the Mukai family brought to their property by choosing to barrel their own strawberries on-site.

“This is obviously a tragic component of a racist history that our country has, with Japanese internment interrupting the ownership of the property to begin with,” Mosqueda said. “But this is also a story about resilience. This is a story about innovation. … Here we are in an effort to try to make reparations for the past harms that were done. We must acknowledge that some of those harms were done through the power of public policy … that ripped land away from people and divided community. We are now using public policy as a tool to repair community.”

Now, she said, she’s excited to see the property tell the story of the Mukai family, boost locally grown food, and serve as an example of a community resource.

To learn more about the Mukai Farm and Garden (and barreling plant), visit Mukaifarmandgarden.org.

This story has been corrected. Due to human error, we misquoted King County Council Member Teresa Mosqueda at the end of this article. The typo, unfortunately, completely reversed the intention of the quote by changing “now” into “not.” The quote now correctly reads: “We are now using public policy as a tool to repair community.”

From left to right: Lynn Greiner, Kay Longhi, Teresa Mosqueda and Jennifer Meisner. In this photo, Mosqueda passes a basket to the Friends of Mukai representing the physical transfer of the barreling plant property back to the Vashon community. Alex Bruell photo