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Community Corner

About Town: Kids Experience Past Lives at Historic Fraser Cabin

Kids aren't all about the video games, as hands-on history comes to life at the Fraser Cabin at Kelsey Creek Farm Park.

You discover the neatest things when you volunteer! When I recently spent a few hours at the Fraser Cabin in , I learned that today’s kids aren’t all about shopping malls, video games and computers.

I’m a board member for . Our duties include serving as docents at the Fraser Cabin during park events such as the annual sheep shearing and harvest festivals. Additionally we open the cabin to the public one Saturday a month during the summer.

The cabin originally was built in 1888 near today’s – at Northup Way and 120th Avenue Northeast. The cabin was moved a couple times before the Bellevue Parks Department relocated it near the farm’s barns. Three of the cabin’s walls are original. The logs are not the rough-hewn ones we often associate with log buildings. They’re tongue-and-groove which means a saw mill or lumber yard trimmed them so they would fit together like building blocks.

As part of the open house, we set out a water pump (like my grandmother once used), butter churning supplies, hand cranked coffee grinder, clothing like what was worn in 1888 and other historical items. We only set out kid-friendly things so visitors can have a hands-on experience.

That’s what was so cool about the visiting families when I volunteered earlier this month. The children were eager to churn butter, grind coffee and pump water. The parents were as interested as the kids in the displays. That part wasn’t surprising. But what charmed me was how things don’t change --- several of the children and families commented on how such-and-such was just like what was in the books.

The books, dear readers, were the “Little House” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. They weren’t talking about the television series based on the books, either. These kids – most of them about third grade – were reading the “Little House” books either by themselves or with their families. That’s a good thing in many ways. It means some families still read and it means out children are still reading.

Speaking of Eastside Heritage –
One of the big attractions at the group’s annual Strawberry Festival this last weekend at Crossroads Park was a giant map of the world that is part of the Smithsonian's Journey Stories exhibit. Visitors were encouraged to put a small colored dot on their homes, their birth places or their families' home countries.

By Saturday night the results were fascinating. Washington, of course, was covered with dots. There was a solid lineup of dots down the west coast of the United States, through Mexico and Central America. There were clusters of dots throughout the U.S. – in the Illinois-Indiana-Wisconsin-Michigan area, dots upon more dots on the East Coast states from Connecticut through Virginia.

Outside the U.S. the biggest collection of dots was Europe – not as many in the Scandinavian countries as in central Europe. There was a heavy concentration of dots in Southern and Central India, a few from Northern India, and a lot on Southeast Asia, China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan.

What a fun idea! It showed how multi-cultured the Eastside has grown in recent years. And that, too, my friends, is another good thing.

If you want to see Journey Stories, the Eastside Heritage Center is displaying the exhibit at

Speaking of the Strawberry Festival –
The final reports won’t be ready for several weeks but Michael Luis, president of Eastside Heritage, called it “an unqualified, outstanding success.”

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How successful? We sold out the flats of strawberries early Sunday. We sold out the strawberry shortcake before the festival was over Sunday evening. We had to re-use the tickets we had for the kids games. We ran out of corn to grind in the mini-museum, we ran out of cans (people could ‘can’ their own time capsule), and we ran out of interview forms for the Journey Stories project.

“I am so proud of this organization and its ability to pull off this terrific event every year that adds a delightful and much appreciated touch to the summer of the Eastside,” Luis said.

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