Healdsburg’s crown jewel event, the Future Farmers Country Fair and accompanying parade through town, is coming in hot this week for its 76th year. What theme are we working with, this time around? “Keeping Ag Alive in 2025,” of course. The whole thing kicked off yesterday morning with a horse show over at Hoofbeat Park on Kinley Drive. Now, the ag youth of Healdsburg and environs have T minus one-and-a-half days to ready their livestock and prepare for the social event of the year.
FFA and 4-H kids in kerchiefs will start showing up to Rec Park with their farm animals as soon as Wednesday morning, according to a PDF schedule drawn up by the Healdsburg Future Farmers Country Fair organization, and will start showing them off first thing Thursday, May 22. Then, at 6pm that evening, comes the main event (IMO): The one and only Twilight Parade, normally filled with around 70-plus floats and groups that run the gamut from wild Oaxacan dancers to high-stepping horse riders to ornate flatbed wonderlands and beyond.
This year’s parade will be grand-marshalled by local couple Dane and Margaret Petersen, who are pretty much royalty in the winemaking and firefighting communities of the Dry Creek and Alexander valleys. Here’s a map of the parade route, courtesy of Healdsburg city officials. And here’s how they describe it: “The parade route starts near St. John’s Church on East and Matheson St., turning right onto Center St. and continuing to Piper St., then heading south on Fitch St., turning onto Matheson St. and ending on University.”
So once all that’s over, an hour or two later — as the last float hits University — the parade’s tightly packed sidelines will start to blur and amorphous blobs of revelers will make their way to the temporary fairgrounds at Rec Park, if trends from the past 75 years are any indication. (Or at least the 38 of those that I’ve been alive!) The fair will stay open til 9:30pm that night, and will keep running Friday and Saturday from 9am-9:30pm.
Fair foods usually include pozole, elote, hotdogs, corndogs, tacos, BBQ, teriyaki, ice cream, funnel cake — you name it. I’m also remembering pens full of bunnies and chickens, live music stages, a Swan Brothers Circus tent, a rock-climbing tower, bouncy houses, garden exhibits, young ranchers-in-training leading their meticulously raised farm animals around a ring and auctioning them off to the highest bidders in the Rec Park stands (making for many tear-stained and heart-wrenching handoffs) while countless other teen dramas unfold under the bright lights of Rec late into the night.
Healdsburg may be rapidly changing, but this is one tradition that sure hasn’t seemed to change much.
Note from Simone: This piece originally appeared in the weekly email newsletter I write for the Healdsburg Tribune, called Healdsburg Today. Subscribe here!
