Almond Festival

Esparto on a February Sunday

On festival Sunday the Future Farmers of America serve breakfast from 7 to 11 in the Esparto High School cafeteria. By mid-morning the crowd moves to Esparto Community Park on Yolo Avenue. The 2026 festival, counted as the 111th, filled the park with more than 60 craft and food vendors. Little Hud played from 10 to noon. The band is seven players from Woodland, and it plays rock hits of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Myriah Monet and the Little Fridays, also from Woodland, took the stage from 1 to 4 with songs of Shania Twain, the Judds, Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton.

The Esparto Volunteer Fire Department holds its annual beer garden on the north lawn of the fire station, also on Yolo Avenue. In 2026 Emmitt Rickey played traditional country and red dirt there from noon to 3, and the Esparto Athletic Boosters sold tri-tip sandwiches. The Madison Volunteer Fire Department’s car show wrapped around the station. The chamber’s page on the valley towns says the Madison department produces the show every year. On Orleans Street the VFW, cash only, opened at 8 a.m. for adult cocktails. It began serving tri-tip sandwiches, chili beans and chips at 11:30, and Johnny Young played from noon to 4. The Esparto Regional Library, next to the park, held a book sale called Books in Bloom. The Esparto Regional Chamber of Commerce, which runs the festival, kept a tent on the square with the day’s schedule.

Saturday has its own program. The 2026 festival revived “Music in the Park,” where the newly crowned Almond Queen was presented. The chamber gave that Family Day to community organizations offering services to local families. The VFW served Belgian waffles, eggs, sausage and fruit, with caramel apple, cranberry and traditional mimosas. Mariachi Los Claveles, a nonprofit youth group of 17 students, played in the park from 11. Conjunto Liberación followed. It is an 11-piece band from Sacramento that plays the New York salsa of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Megan Lachowski of Woodland Cuban Dance taught Casino and Rueda de Casino, Cuban social dances she began learning in 2012 with the Rumbanana Salsa Group in Corvallis, Oregon. On February 20, 2026, the festival’s Facebook page reported a dry forecast for the weekend.

Up Highway 16 to Rumsey

The Greater Capay Valley Historical Society describes the program this way: festivities begin in Esparto, and visitors take “the traditional and beautiful drive” up the valley to Capay, Brooks, Guinda and Rumsey. Writing in 2015, Elizabeth Monroe of the Friends of the Yolo County Archives put the route at 22 miles, from Esparto to Rumsey. The Woodland Daily Democrat in 2020 and Tuleyome in 2026 gave 21. Monroe and Tuleyome count five towns. The Daily Democrat counted six by adding Madison. Monroe described the valley as lying between two mountain ranges, watered by Cache Creek, and the largest almond-growing region in Yolo County.

Stops along the way in 2026:

• Capay Hills Orchard, near Esparto, gave tours both days. The family grows only its own raw organic almonds and sells them, along with almonds smoked over almond wood and stone-ground almond butter.
• Capay Valley Lavender, in Capay, opened its farm store with lavender treats.
• Séka Hills Olive Mill, in Brooks, led almond blossom tours from 10:30, with live music and a cooking demonstration at noon. Brooks is the ancestral land of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, whose Séka Hills brand covers wine, olive oil, vinegar and honey.
• Capay Valley Vineyards, also in Brooks, poured wine and parked a 1962 Corvette and a 1960 Nash Metropolitan on display.
• Guinda held a country celebration on Forest Avenue with artisans, homemade almond roca and a 4-H petting zoo. The chamber’s town page says the Western Yolo Grange there shows old farm engines and machinery during the festival.
• Rumsey Town Hall, at the top of the route in a town once called Rock, marked its 120th anniversary. It held an artisan market, sold wood-fired pizza and homemade cookies, ran a silent auction, and invited visitors to walk the historic Rumsey Bridge.

The Almond Queen worked the same road on a printed timetable. She left the Esparto park at 9:45 and reached the Road Trip Bar & Grill at 11:00, Capay Valley Lavender at 12:45, Rumsey Hall at 1:15 and the Guinda Grange Hall at 2:00. She was back in the park at 3:45.

A harvest parade in 1915

According to the Daily Democrat, the idea came up at a Western Yolo County Chamber of Commerce meeting in May 1915. Capay Valley almond growers and the Yolo County Farm Bureau backed it. The Daily Democrat and Monroe both date the first festival to September 4, 1915. The Esparto chamber’s own history, repeated by Visit Yolo, says October 1915. In the chamber’s account it was a two-day harvest celebration: a parade on Saturday and the usual festival activities on Sunday. The high school homecoming queen was crowned Almond Queen and rode at the center of the parade. The Daily Democrat names Thomas Brock as grand marshal of that first festival.

The festival ran until the Second World War. The chamber says it was suspended then, “likely to conserve resources.” Monroe gives the start of a 22-year hiatus as 1943. In her account, the Esparto District Chamber of Commerce voted in February 1965, the festival’s 50th birthday, to “reactivate” it. The chamber, the Daily Democrat and the historical society all give the revival year as 1964. The Daily Democrat says it returned as an Almond Blossom Festival. According to Monroe, the chamber had decided the spring blossoms were the real draw, so the date moved from the fall harvest to the last Sunday in February. The historical society says the date shifted between February and March depending on the weather. The society also notes that today’s Esparto Regional Chamber of Commerce began as one district chamber among many in Yolo County.

Princesses, pickup trucks and a centennial cake

Lani (Burris) Yukimura says she was the first Almond Princess since Helen McCants was crowned in 1930. “I know the Almond Festival has really ‘blossomed’ since then,” she told Monroe, “and I feel honored to have been a part of its revival.” In 1970 the chamber took over the Queen Pageant, and the Esparto High School homecoming queen and her court no longer reigned over the festival. From then on, businesses and organizations sponsored the candidates. By 2015 the Almond Queen Dinner was held at the Western Yolo Grange in Guinda, up Forest Avenue behind the old Corner Store. The chamber now awards the title for academic work and community service.

The Daily Democrat recorded a stretch when the festival was nearly shut down. It had become a rowdy day of drinking and racing trucks around Cache Creek. Volunteers reorganized it as a family event.

Planning for the 100th began in 2014. That August the Valley Voice, the valley’s monthly paper, asked each town and organization to send people to a committee. The almond recipe contest had done well the year before. The paper proposed more contests, among them who could crack the most almonds in 30 seconds and a children’s relay carrying an almond on an ice cream tasting spoon. The same issue welcomed Cindy Kringen, long a volunteer on festival and Grange work, as the chamber’s paid administrative assistant. Camilla Barry, the chamber’s executive director, baked an almond coffee cake from a 1915 issue of the San Francisco Call and served it at Rumsey House, her bed-and-breakfast. She found it heavier than modern coffee cakes. She suspected her oven, set at 325 degrees, and the old recipe’s extra butter and eggs. “I believe there is further scientific research to be done here!”