Sometimes you come across a story in a group of records that stands out from the other papers in a collection. Within the County Poor Farm's business correspondence (Collection multco002) there are letters between B. Fujii (a farmer in Troutdale, OR) and Edgefield Manor (the County Poor Farm) Superintendent O.A. Johnson from 1942-1944. So who were these men and what was their relationship during WWII?
Adjacent to Edgefield Manor, there was a 140 acre farm owned by Bukichi and Yoshino Fujii, Japanese immigrants who came to America in the early 1900s, started a family (6 boys and two girls), and successfully sold produce at the Portland Farmers Market and Gresham Berry Growers. The Fujii family’s story is unique because many Japanese-American families that were sent to incarceration camps never regained their property after World War II. The Fujii’s were able to keep their farm with help from neighbors. One of those neighbors was Edgefield Manor, whose Superintendent O.A. Johnson entered into an agreement with the Fujii family to cut and sell hay from the Fujii farm’s adjoining 27acres. A letter in this collection dated October 28, 1942 describes the cost of labor, seeding the hay, the cutting and bailing, and the amount of profit leftover totalling $468.33. Other letters in the collection mention sending money to the Fujiis who were then working at a labor camp in Nyssa, Oregon.
The Fujii family were relocated to Nyssa, after being detained at the Portland Assembly Center, where they worked as critical farm laborers living in tent camps for much of that time. Established as a result of the "Oregon Plan" for the forced removal and confinement of the state's Nikkei residents, the camp held approximately three hundred fifty laborers at its peak. Another letter that B. Fujii sent to O.A. Johnson states that “. . . there are over 300 Japanese, formerly farmers in Hillboro, Gresham, and the Yakima Valley of Washington. They are an asset to the farmers in this part of the country as we are all old hands in this field.”
In 1945, the Fujiis returned to their farm in Troutdale and expanded their holdings. Son, Edward Fujii stepped back from farming and became a wholesale produce broker, under the name of Ed Fujii Produce, selling to large grocery chains. Edward retired in 1990 and sold the business which still operates under his original name. You never know what stories you might uncover while looking through business records! You can learn more about the history of the Fujii family from the oral history of Aya Fujii (wife of Ed Fujii) at Oregon State University and online here: https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/oh150/fujii/video-fujii.html. There are photos of the Fujii family on their farm in 1945 at the Online Archive of California https://oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0b69n66c/.
