Battle Ground Harvest Days

On the Friday evening that opens Harvest Days, the city of Battle Ground closes Main Street from Northwest Fifth Avenue to Northeast Grace Avenue. From 6 to 9:30 the Harvest Nights Cruise runs the strip, open only to vehicles built in 1995 or earlier. Spectators claim the curbs early. In 2017, with the temperature over 85 degrees, people turned plastic milk crates upside down and lined them along the curb in front of Andersen Dairy nearly an hour before the first cars came by. Across the street, pickups backed into the gravel lot with their tail ends facing Main. After the 2026 cruise, the festival’s page asked for help finding a participant’s chair, left across from the Chevron in old town near the ice cream shop.

Harvest Days falls on the third weekend of July. The 2026 festival ran July 17 through 19 and was put on by the volunteer Battle Ground Festivals Association. Most of it took place at Battle Ground High School, 300 W. Main St., and on Main Street itself. It coincided that year with the city’s 75th anniversary and the nation’s 250th.

Saturday, from the griddle to the fireworks

A pancake breakfast opens Saturday at 7 a.m. In earlier years Clark County Fire District 3 cooked it as an open house and all-you-can-eat feed, and in 2018 the proceeds went to a local family in need chosen by the district.

At 9 a.m. in Central Park, 414 East Main Street, a rose is planted for the Citizen of the Year. The Royal Rosarians come up from Portland for the ceremony. Their 2025 plan called for full whites, hats, gloves and capes, with the ceremony at 8:30 and the Rosarians leaving for the parade at 9. The Battle Ground Education Foundation’s fun run also starts on Main Street at 9.

The parade steps off at 10. The Reflector described its route in 2018: it leaves the high school and runs east along Main Street, turns left on Northeast Clark Avenue and left again on Northeast First Street, goes north on Parkway Avenue, and takes a last left on Northwest Third Way back to the high school. Businesses, charities, churches and school bands make up the entries, and in 2026 there were more of them than organizers wanted. “We’re over capacity,” John Idsinga said before the festival. “Right now, we’re at 104, maybe 105 (entries). We try to limit (entrants) to mid-90s.” The city council and the Public Works crew rode along blowing bubbles and passing out candy. The announcers’ booth stood at the Department of Licensing, and the National Wings and Armor Foundation flew over the route.

After the parade the crowd moves to the high school, where the carnival runs all weekend. In 2026 tickets were $1 each and rides took five to eight. A kids market replaced the old vendor fair, with sellers aged 5 to 17; Kendra Laratta of the festivals association had counted 23 of them before opening day. The Little Firefighters Challenge ran from noon to 3, and a BMX bike show ran at the Battle Ground Event Center. From 2 to 6 the 4x4 show put trucks on an RTI ramp and an obstacle course, Shane Bowman said.

The Main Stage, with chairs and shade set out, ran from 12:30 to 6. The 2026 bill included:

• a taekwondo demonstration with board-breaking
• the One of a Kind Drumline, followed by drumming the audience could try
• a television theme song contest
• the Studio Dance Company and two youth cheer squads
• beginner yoga with The Yoga Annex
• a blindfold food-tasting contest for the title of Master of Taste
• a trivia championship on Battle Ground, Clark County, Harvest Days and Mount St. Helens
• a closing session of laughter yoga

The Pie Eating Championship, which the festival counts among its traditions, pays out in trophies. Contestants under 18 need a parent’s permission.

The fireworks go up near the high school at 10 p.m. Saturday. In 2022 the association hired the same company that puts on the Fort Vancouver shows. In 2026 Jon Himes and Western Display Fireworks lit the sky, and the festival streamed the show live. Sunday was new in 2026: the True Impressions Car Club’s Clark County chapter filled Main Street from 11 to 3 with cars and motorcycles of any year. “We’ve been looking for something for Sunday to happen for a while,” Laratta said.

Shirts of red, green and yellow

Before the 2026 festival, the organizers posted that everyone wearing a red, bright green or yellow staff shirt or a safety vest is a volunteer. Volunteers drive side-by-sides and golf carts, run registration, direct traffic, man the road blocks, shoot the photographs and clean up afterward. Some close their own small businesses early to do it. Laratta said the work “is being spread out through very few people,” and added, “We’d love to add more stuff but we are really at the limit of what we can do with what we have now.”

The chamber steps away

Harvest Days has been held since 1957, and for years the Battle Ground Chamber of Commerce ran it. By 2018 its director, Jeffrey Wingfield, had watched too many activities spring up on opposite sides of town. He feared the festival was losing the sense of community it had originally been designed to create, so that July the chamber gathered everything at the high school and on Main Street. “We want to have everything centrally located in town so people can just park their car in one place and stay for the whole day,” Wingfield said. Carnival games on the south fields cost 50 cents, against the $3 to $5 visitors had paid for rides in past years. The parade, as usual, had no marshal. Officials estimated that about 12,000 people had lined its route the summer before.

According to Clark County Today, the 2018 festival ran a day shorter than usual and had no carnival. That fall the Battle Ground chamber merged with the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce, which left the dwindling festival without an organizer. “That left an empty spot for these types of activities, so a new group was formed just from people in the community,” said Laratta, owner of Ink Ability in Battle Ground and a member of the new association.

The Cruzz-In and after

The 2019 festival ran a full three days, July 19 through 21, and was organized entirely by citizens. The organizers had canceled the Harvest Nights Car Cruise. When word came that regulars meant to hold one of their own anyway, the association staged the Cruzz-In for vehicles from 1978 and older, with no burnout pit. “We saw a lot of response that people were going to come and cruise anyway, and thought maybe we would be better off being proactive rather than waiting for the chaos to come,” Laratta said.

Several cars on the strip that night had stories:

• Aaron Knisley brought his 1972 Chevrolet Camaro RS/SS for the second time.
• John Earnest, a former middle school teacher from Dollars Corner, showed a 1929 Ford Model A he had restored. “They were called station wagons back then, going from the train station to people’s houses,” he said.
• Mechanic and collector Greagg Long debuted a 1966 Stingray Corvette he had found online in Maine and had shipped west. Long said the restoration cost over $150,000.

The carnival was back on the southeast lawn of the high school that year. More than 25 firefighters from around Clark County ran a timed course of hose work and dummy drags in a new Firefighter Combat Challenge. “So, you pit one firefighter against the other,” explained Captain Mel Hall of Fire District 3, while children ran a smaller course of their own beside it. The community stage held a dad joke contest and a lip-sync battle. In the lip-sync, Courtney Dawson and her 6-year-old daughter Harper, in full costume, performed the Pokémon theme song. “It’s taking it back down to the small town,” Dawson said, “and just coming together and having a good time with our small, big town.”

In 2022 the festival ran two days. A mini midway and Bounce-N-Battle inflatables stood in for a full carnival, the parade drew 95 entries, and an estimated 10,000 people watched the cruise and parade.

On July 15, 2023, a 17-year-old girl fell from a tractor-trailer in the parade near the 200 block of North Parkway Avenue and was swept under it, according to the city. She was conscious and speaking when she was taken to a hospital with serious injuries. Parade-goers alerted an officer at a nearby blockade, and the festivals committee rerouted the parade so responders could reach her. “Thanks to their swift action, and that of our officer and emergency medical personnel, the patient was able to receive care immediately,” said Chief Mike Fort.

The first 4x4 show came the next summer, in 2024, at the corner of Parkway Avenue and Main Street, where trucks flexed their suspensions in exchange for canned food donations.