New Bainbridge Island Park Preserves the Site of the Island's Largest Japanese American Farm

Bainbridge Island's park district has acquired 7.31 acres at the corner of Koura and Miller roads, adding a new trailhead across from Grand Forest North. The Bainbridge Island Metropolitan Park & Recreation District's Board of Commissioners approved the purchase on Aug. 6, funded through commitments the Bainbridge Island Parks & Trails Foundation secured from private donors, according to the Bainbridge Island Review.

The land sits in the Meadowmeer neighborhood, on ground that carries the name of the family who farmed strawberries there for decades before being forced from the island in 1942. "This land has such rich cultural history and many stories to share," Foundation Executive Director Mary Meier said, according to the Kitsap Sun. Park District Executive Director Dan Hamlin said the district will work with the community this fall to shape the trails. Neither official put a dollar figure on the purchase price, and the district has not disclosed one.

A New Trailhead Across From Grand Forest North

The parcel runs directly across Koura Road from the northern edge of Grand Forest North, Bainbridge Island's largest forested park, and the district says it opens options to extend the trail network as far north as Bay Hill Road. The purchase adds more than 600 feet of north-south pedestrian path set back from the shoulder of Miller Road, letting trail users avoid walking the road edge to reach the forest. Planned connections would link Grand Forest North to the Fieldstone trail, Penny Place, Bergman Road and Yukio Lane.

District records describe the property as forested natural area with minimal invasive weed cover, meaning little site preparation is needed before trails go in. The sellers required protective covenants restricting future use to open space for trails and trail-related facilities only, a legal condition that survives even a future change in park board membership or budget priorities and forecloses any later push to develop the parcel for housing or commercial use. Interpretive signage sharing the site's agricultural history is planned alongside the trails, and the foundation says community conversations on trail design and signage content will begin this fall, before construction starts.

The addition matters beyond its own 7.31 acres because of what it connects to. Grand Forest North is one of three sections, alongside Grand Forest West and Grand Forest East, that together make up roughly 240 acres and eight miles of trail at the center of the island, one of the largest contiguous stretches of protected forest on Bainbridge Island and a key piece of its wildlife corridor. Grand Forest North sits apart from the West-East pair, connected to the rest of the system only by road, which is part of why a safe, separated approach on the Koura Road side matters as much as the acreage itself.

The Road's Name Traces to a Family That Farmed the Land

Koura Road takes its name from Otohiko and Hatsuko Koura, who arrived on Bainbridge Island by steamboat in 1919 to pick strawberries, then left their home and cafe business in Seattle the following year to farm full time. The family's first plot was a seven-acre parcel near where the island's public library now stands, before they moved to farm the land that became Koura Road roughly five years later.

Washington's Alien Land Law barred Japanese-born immigrants from owning property outright, so the farm was legally registered to the couple's American-born son, Arthur "Art" Koura, who became the titled owner at 18 on his parents' behalf, a legal workaround common among Issei farming families across the Puget Sound region at the time. By the 1960s the Koura farm had grown to 188 acres, by multiple historical accounts the largest strawberry operation on Bainbridge Island, built through decades of Issei and Nisei labor on ground that today's new park parcel sits directly beside.

The Koura farm was part of a wider agricultural community rather than an isolated operation. Japanese American growers including the Sakuma family, who began growing berries on the island around 1915, and the Nakata family, who farmed a separate plot known as Middlefield Farm, ran strawberry operations elsewhere on Bainbridge Island that, together with the Kouras, made the island one of the Puget Sound region's major berry producers before World War II. A Bainbridge Island Review retrospective on the island's berry-farming years later described the crop as fruit "fit for kings and queens," a measure of how central the harvest had become to the island's identity before the war interrupted it.

Forced Off the Island in Six Days

The Koura family's farming came to an abrupt halt on March 30, 1942, when 227 Japanese Americans living on Bainbridge Island were gathered at the Eagledale Ferry Dock and forcibly removed under Civilian Exclusion Order No. 1, the first of 108 such orders issued nationwide under Executive Order 9066, according to the HistoryLink historical archive. Western Defense Commander Gen. John DeWitt had issued the order six days earlier, citing the island's proximity to the Puget Sound Navy Yard, giving residents almost no time to arrange for their homes, businesses and land before they had to leave.

The Kouras were sent first to the Manzanar concentration camp in California, more than 900 miles from home. Nobuzo Koura, a member of the family, died at Manzanar within weeks of arriving, at age 68, and remains buried at the camp today, one of the incarceration's less-told costs. The family was later transferred to the Minidoka camp in Idaho in February 1943, joining most of Seattle's incarcerated Japanese American community there, separated from the handful of Bainbridge families who had been sent to different camps. None of the Bainbridge Islanders removed that spring was ever charged with or convicted of espionage or sabotage, a fact the island's own exclusion memorial and the National Park Service both note explicitly, since the removal was carried out on the basis of ancestry alone rather than any individual suspicion.

What Remains of the Farm Today

The Kouras returned to Bainbridge Island after the war to find their farm intact, left in the care of a trusted friend who had held it for them. That was a rarer outcome than many incarcerated Japanese American families experienced statewide, since land, equipment and businesses were frequently lost, sold under duress or seized outright during the years families spent in camps. The family farmed until 1964, when competition from cheaper California-grown strawberries, combined with children moving off the island for college and other work, led them to sell all but 40 acres of the original spread.

No Kouras farm the land today. Much of the original 188 acres is now the Meadowmeer neighborhood, where the new park parcel sits, and the golf course that gives the area its name, the kind of postwar suburban development that replaced farmland across much of Bainbridge Island as the island's economy shifted away from agriculture in the second half of the century. What survives are the street names, Koura Road, Koura Lane and Koura Farm Road, plus a stone marker recalling the farm and the historic Koura barn, which the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community now maintains as an education site for school groups and visitors learning the island's agricultural and wartime history together. Until this month, that scattered set of place names was largely what connected the neighborhood to the family whose labor shaped it; the new park is the first piece of public land in the immediate area built specifically to carry that history forward rather than simply reference it in passing.

Part of a Broader Push to Protect Island Land

The Koura Road purchase is the second acquisition the Parks & Trails Foundation has driven this summer. The foundation is also supporting the Bainbridge Island Land Trust's "Stand for the Grand Forest" campaign, an effort to raise more than $2 million to protect 39 acres at Grand Forest East for eventual purchase by the park district, part of the same three-section Grand Forest system as the Koura Road parcel, though a different, non-adjacent section of it. Between the two efforts, the foundation is working to add roughly 46 acres to the island's protected trail network in a single year.

Both campaigns reflect a pattern on Bainbridge Island this year: private philanthropy assembling land piece by piece around the Grand Forest core rather than the district buying it outright with tax dollars, which would require voter approval or reallocating an already strained parks budget. The foundation exists specifically to move faster than the district's own bonding and levy cycles allow, stepping in when a parcel comes up for sale on a timeline no public vote could match, then transferring the land to district ownership once the purchase closes.

Hamlin's comment about shaping trails "with the community this fall" signals the foundation intends the interpretive and design work, not just the acquisition itself, to be a public process rather than something decided internally and announced only after the fact. That distinction matters for how the Japanese American history gets told on-site: whether the signage frames the Koura family's story as a footnote to a recreational amenity or as the central reason the parcel was worth protecting in the first place is still an open question the fall meetings are meant to answer.

What It Means for Islanders

For residents, the immediate change is modest: a new access point and roughly 600 feet of path that keeps walkers off the Miller Road shoulder, with actual trail construction still pending this fall's community sessions. Anyone wanting a say in how the site is designed, or how its history is presented, should watch for the foundation's fall outreach rather than wait for a finished trail to react to. The larger significance is what the foundation chose to do with what could have been a routine trail-expansion purchase: attach it, publicly, to the specific history of the family whose name is on the road sign, rather than treat the acquisition purely as recreational real estate.

That framing is not automatic. Most of the 227 Bainbridge Islanders removed in 1942 are remembered collectively at the island's Japanese American Exclusion Memorial near the old Eagledale dock, an affiliated site of the National Park Service, rather than at the individual farm sites where they actually lived and worked for decades. Planning interpretive signage into a working trailhead, instead of a standalone memorial visitors must seek out separately, means hikers headed into Grand Forest North will pass through that history as part of an ordinary walk in the woods, not as a detour they have to choose to take. The foundation's fall community sessions will determine whether that promise holds once the trails are actually built.