Cider, Crafts and a Curious Prize Await at Point Defiance Today

There are museums where visitors stand quietly, read plaques and try very hard not to touch anything.

Fort Nisqually’s Harvest Home is not that kind of museum day.

The annual celebration fills the reconstructed 1850s trading post with the work, food and rituals that once accompanied the end of the growing season. More importantly, much of it is designed for visitors to do—not simply observe.

Here are some of the best reasons to make the trip into Point Defiance today.

The day’s centerpiece is a historic cider press supplied with apples harvested from Fort Nisqually’s own orchard.

Visitors can help operate the press and watch a pile of fruit become fresh cider using mechanical muscle rather than electricity. It is sticky, physical and considerably more memorable than watching someone else demonstrate it from behind a rope.

This year, the fort is adding a closer look at how apple butter was traditionally prepared over the kitchen fire pit.

Despite the name, apple butter contains no dairy butter. It is made by slowly cooking apples until they become dark, concentrated and spreadable—a process that required time, attention and plenty of stirring before modern appliances entered the kitchen.

Visitors can also stop by the fort’s period kitchen for samples of baked goods prepared as part of the celebration. Parks Tacoma describes the event as a chance to experience the “sights, sounds and smells” of the season, and the kitchen may provide the most convincing argument for the smells.

Family crafts include making dolls from dried corn husks, a toy that can be created from materials left behind after a crop is harvested.

That makes Harvest Home especially well suited to families whose children would rather make, press and decorate things than listen to a conventional history lesson. The lesson is still there—it simply arrives disguised as an activity.

Guests can help decorate the fort’s hock cart, a traditional wagon used to carry the last sheaves collected during the harvest.

The finished cart becomes a visible celebration of completing the season’s work. It also serves as a reminder that a successful harvest once determined far more than what appeared on the dinner table: It shaped whether a household or community had enough food and supplies to make it through the months ahead.

Fort Nisqually’s teen apprentice interpreters spend their time learning to present the complicated history of life around Puget Sound in the 1850s.

Today, two of them will receive a particularly unusual assignment: serving as the Harvest King and Queen. The ceremonial crowning provides a festive ending to the harvest activities—and an excellent opportunity for parents to explain why they were not offered royal titles for cleaning out the garage.

Visitors with canning ambitions can bring a small jar of homemade jam or jelly for the festival’s preserves competition.

Judges will taste the entries and select a winner, who gets to “take the egg.” Organizers do not overexplain the wonderfully peculiar prize, which is probably part of its charm.

Even without a homemade entry, the contest offers a glimpse of the friendly competition that can emerge when preserving food is both a practical skill and a source of household pride.

Fort Nisqually interprets life at the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost in 1855, when the operation had shifted from fur trading toward large-scale agriculture. Ten buildings are open to visitors, including the original Granary and Factor’s House—both National Historic Landmarks.

Costumed interpreters help connect the harvest activities to the people who lived and worked around Puget Sound during that period. The result is less like attending a seasonal fair inside a museum and more like finding the museum temporarily brought to life. Fort Nisqually’s historical overview provides additional background.

Harvest Home runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. today at Fort Nisqually Living History Museum, 5519 Five Mile Drive inside Point Defiance Park. Adult event admission is listed at $17, children younger than 4 enter free, and admission is free for Fort Nisqually members. Tickets are available online here.