American Falls Days

At ten in the morning on a Saturday in early August, the American Falls Day parade steps off on Harrison Street. It winds through Pocatello Avenue, Hillcrest Avenue and Roosevelt Avenue and ends near American Falls City Park, in the Power County seat. Area residents, businesses, organizations and community fixtures build the floats, and a photograph from a past parade shows cheerleaders in the line. The Greater American Falls Area Chamber of Commerce runs the day, which its own pages call both American Falls Day and AF Days.

In 2026 the parade fell on August 1 under the theme “Stars, Stripes and Small Town Pride.” Chamber treasurer Nikki Cummins said the theme was a nod to the nation’s 250th anniversary and to the Fourth of July celebrations earlier that month. “We’ll be looking for a lot of red, white and blue and small-town pride,” she told the Idaho State Journal. After the day, the Chamber thanked local law enforcement for making the event possible.

Sixty-five booths in City Park

When the parade ends, the crowd moves into the park. City Park covers about 7.3 acres in the heart of the city, next to the central business district. It has picnic facilities, two horseshoe pits, a volleyball area, a gazebo, playground equipment and items of historical interest. On American Falls Day the street between the park’s two sides is closed so vendors and visitors can gather freely.

In 2026 about 65 vendors set up there, offering food, handmade goods, retail items, community resources and family activities through the day. Some carried information or merchandise for America250. The 2025 booths ranged from jewelry and jams to face painting and bounce houses.

Class reunions traditionally gather in the park during the celebration, and family reunions choose the day as well. “It’s the time that really everyone comes together,” Cummins said in 2026. Of the crowd she said, “The street is pretty full. I would say high hundreds, if not thousands — it’s a pretty good turnout for the town. It’s our one big event that happens every year.” The Idaho State Journal calls the celebration a consistent fixture of the community for decades.

A town on the move

The town the celebration belongs to once stood somewhere else. In the 1920s the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began building the American Falls Dam, which EastIdahoNews describes as one of the country’s first major federal reclamation projects. To make way for the reservoir, the whole town was uprooted and rebuilt in a planned effort that moved homes, businesses, churches and even the railroad. The accounts place the old site differently. EastIdahoNews puts the original town along the Snake River and the new one on higher ground. The Idaho State Journal puts the old site down where the reservoir now sits. The move is dated to 1925. EastIdahoNews reports that American Falls remains one of the only communities in the country to be entirely moved and reestablished as an official townsite.

The 2025 edition, held Saturday, August 2, marked the hundredth year under the theme “100 Years of American Falls: A Town on the Move!” Power County Museum board members set out artifacts in the park and explained the 1925 relocation. Centennial pins donated by the Chamber were sold to benefit the museum. At the America250 booth, visitors could sign a digital copy of the Declaration of Independence and become official America250 ambassadors.

That evening, and the evening before, more than 40 cars ran the Power County Bump & Rub on a muddy track at the Power County Fairgrounds. Local and out-of-town drivers raced while swerving to avoid one another, or swerving to bump.

A museum in the old hospital

The Power County Museum sits on Pocatello Avenue, one of the streets the parade follows. It occupies part of the old Bethany Deaconess Hospital, a building started in 1926 and completed the following year. The sources differ on when the museum opened. The county’s history page says it held its grand opening during the American Falls Day celebration in 2007. EastIdahoNews, writing before the 2026 edition, urged visitors to stop by the “newly opened” museum.

Its exhibits cover the era when the town was relocated for the dam. The building holds an Industry Room, medical and home exhibits, art exhibits, a research library and a large collection of historical photographs. Pamphlets list the National Historic Places in American Falls, and a walking tour leads to the places that were moved. The museum sells bonnets and a few books on the area, among them Ella Rast’s The Whole Dam Story: The Drowning and Rising of a River City in the West.

The county keeps a list of local places on the National Register of Historic Places. Between the American Falls East Shore Power Plants and the Oneida Milling and Elevator Company Grain Elevator, it lists the American Falls Reservoir Flooded Town Site.