Bohemia Mining Days

About a week before the third weekend of July, a row of wooden false fronts goes up along the edge of Coiner Park on East Main Street in Cottage Grove. Tents and booths fill the lawn behind it, and by noon on Thursday the place is Bohemia City, open for the season. The 2026 festival, the 67th, opened on Thursday, July 16. Matthew Hewlett opened it from the Main Stage. He is executive director of Spirit of Bohemia Mining Days and, for the weekend, The Jailer. Admission is free. For three days the town honors the gold and silver mining heritage of the Bohemia Mining District in the mountains above Cottage Grove.

Bohemia City in Coiner Park

The organization counted 97 vendors in 2026, from Helen’s Cotton Candy to Queen Bee Accessories. Since 2025 the vendors have competed to dress themselves and their booths in time-appropriate fashion. City Councilor Dana Merryday moderates that contest. He is also Mayor of Bohemia City and gives a history talk on the Heritage Stage on Friday morning. Visitors are asked to come in period clothes as well. The festival’s list of what to bring runs to lawn chairs, sunscreen, cash, and western attire, “preferred, but not required.”

Living history demonstrations are set up around the grounds: hit-and-miss engines, gold panning, blacksmithing, and Native American culture. The festival teaches the last in partnership with Dietz, an elder of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. The Cottage Grove Prospectors and Golddiggers and the Bohemia Mine Owners Association come to the park to talk about local history. The CGAC booth hangs an art show and historic art exhibit, and on Friday evening it holds a wool spinning demonstration and lets visitors paint rocks to take home or leave behind.

Hewlett told The Chronicle in July 2026 that he wants the festival to recapture its status as an educational experience. “But also, I want people to be immersed in the world in the same way that they would at a Renaissance fair,” he said. The 2026 theme was “Rivers, Rails, and Reels”: the waterways that shaped early life, the railroads that moved people and resources, and the films that put Cottage Grove on the screen. Hewlett’s research had turned up a mixed mining country. Miners came off the mountain seriously ill and sought out indigenous healers. A Japanese family moved in over the winter of 1912 and cooked for the miners. Chinese workers helped build the roads in. “There are these stories, these pocket stories of these really good moments of people just getting along and loving one another,” he said.

Music runs on two stages through all three days. In 2026 Skip Jones & the Spirit of New Orleans played piano boogie-woogie on Thursday night. The Regulars, a Cottage Grove cover band, played the same evening. On Friday Rock ‘n Rewind of Eugene played 1960s and 1970s hits from the San Francisco scene and the British invasion. The Coast Fork Saloon pours beer from Coast Fork Brewing until last call at 10 p.m. Elsewhere in the park are an inflatable area with a mechanical bull called “Bucky” and a Bohemia City Jail Cell photobooth. There is no carnival. The festival’s own answer to that question is that the chance of one returning is “very slim,” because Covid forced most carnival companies that served small rural towns to sell their equipment.

The Feud Games pit Slabtown against Lemati on Friday and Saturday at the Gazebo and the Heritage Stage. The events include outhouse cornhole, fuse winding, cherry pit spitting, mining in the dark, a costume contest, and a beard and mustache contest. There is also a pie eating contest, with pies donated by Slabtown Coffee.

Steak on Thursday, stew on Friday

The Miner’s Dinner opens the festival at 5 p.m. Thursday in the Chuckwagon Area: grilled steak seasoned with a local spice blend from Darkside Smokehouse, baked potato, cornbread, baked beans, and a cookie. Leftover steak goes into Friday’s Chuck Wagon Stew, served with cornbread, iced tea, and lemonade at $7 a person. Urban Kitchen serves a chuckwagon breakfast in the park at 7 a.m. Saturday. On Sunday at 6 a.m., after the park has closed, the Prospectors and Golddiggers hold their “Breakfast on the Mountain” up in the Bohemia Mining District itself. The club introduced that Sunday breakfast in 1964.

Parade day on Main Street

Saturday starts with children running the Gold Dash up Main Street at 9:45. The Grand Miners Parade follows at about 10, with 54 entries in 2026. At high noon the Mine Ore Cart Races begin on 10th Street in front of the Bohemia Gold Mining Museum. The 2026 race was the fourth, presented with the Bohemia Mine Owners Association and sponsored by Weyerhaeuser. Each team builds a human-powered ore cart of at least 150 pounds. Two Miners push a rider, the Tommyknocker, from the line. At the halfway point the Tommyknocker climbs out, loads three 20-pound sandbags without help, gets back in, and the team races home. First place takes a pickaxe trophy and a bag of $100 in Sacagawea dollar coins. Second takes a silver shovel and $75, third a copper mining pan and $50. The crowd votes a People’s Choice award.

The rest of Saturday runs at the park. Blacksmiths work at Heritage Hollow from noon to 4. The Lil Miss Bohemia City contest is on the Heritage Stage at 3:30. Bands play from 11:30 until the festival closes at 10 p.m.

Two events ran off the grounds on Friday night in 2026. Cottage Theatre staged an original melodrama by local playwright Keith Kessler, The Legend Grows Round the Mystery Mine . . . OR The Villains were Schooled by the Marm, with 18 young teens in the cast. The Gold Rush 5K started at 8 p.m. It ran down Main Street and River Road along the Willamette South Fork, past where Buster Keaton shot part of The General.

Bohemia Johnson’s mines

The festival takes its name from the mining district, and the district takes its name from a man nobody has pinned down. Hewlett wrote the organization’s history of the district. In it, James “Bohemia” Johnson allegedly killed a Native man near Roseburg in 1863, fled into the mountains with a man named Ramsey, and found gold there. The gold country became known as “Bohemia Johnson’s Mines,” and later simply the “Bohemia Mines.” Johnson’s true identity remains a mystery. A Spirit of Bohemia Mining Days video traces the district’s story from first gold discoveries in 1858 through mines, mills, tramways, collapses, and revivals.

The organization’s short histories keep turning up district stories. In the late 1890s a fight over the rights to the Helena Mine on Grizzly Mountain went to court, called more than 70 witnesses, and left the mine under injunction. On September 11, 1911, Gavin “Guy” T. Hogg became postmaster of Champion, Oregon. He was also one of the businessmen behind the Champion Mine, which had changed hands in a deal reported at roughly $400,000 in 1910. His post office worked out of one end of a three-story bunkhouse and cookhouse at the mine. After Parcel Post arrived, mailing a sack of ore could cost less than paying a freighter to haul it down.

From Bohemia Days to the Spirit of BMD

A mid-summer Bohemia Days was held for a few years in the 1930s. A large history celebration followed in 1955. For Oregon’s Centennial, the town held a statehood birthday party. Ray Nelson chaired the Centennial committee and organized the Prospectors and Golddiggers Club for it. That event helped sow the seeds of what became Bohemia Mining Days, first held in 1959. The same year the Sentinel began printing the Bohemia Nugget, the annual insert that serves as the festival’s guide. In 1964 committee member Bill Whiteman was told that Bohemia Days celebrated mining history. He suggested Bohemia Mining Days instead, to let people know what to expect, and the name stuck.

In 1970 Jerry Lewis rode in the parade, which drew 107 entries. The record rose to 125 in 1982. In 1976 Henry Isaacs, Bohemia City Marshal and a national fast draw champion, brought the National Fast Draw Competition to the festival. When he retired, Mayor Gary Williams was sworn in as Marshal. Ellen Hogue helped lead the festival with her husband Gary from 1969 to 2001. Don Williams and his wife Jean ran it and coordinated the parade from 1979 to 1999. Don recalled the rebuilding of 1980. There was $81 in the bank, and he signed $3,600 in contracts on faith that the town would back them. Every bill was paid, with money left over. The first Chicken BBQ came in 1985. In 1999 a last-minute move of the festival downtown forced a change in the parade route. In 2007 a Thursday Bloomers Parade began, with women and girls in bloomers carrying parasols and voting-rights signs.

Rain caused a financial crisis in 2011. The City of Cottage Grove financed the next festival, and the repayments paid for electrical improvements in the park. In 2014 the state named Bohemia Mining Days an Oregon Heritage Tradition, an honorary designation for events with more than 50 years of history. The Chamber named the festival Nonprofit of the Year for its 2019 Diamond Jubilee. The Bohemia Mining Days Executive Board did not hold the festival in 2020 because of Covid. Cindy Weeldreyer and Don Williams led the revival that followed.

In late May 2024, Bohemia Mining Days Inc. announced there would be no festival that year, citing a lack of funding and volunteers, and later closed. Former production team members and area coordinators hurriedly put on the 65th anniversary under a “Spirit of BMD” banner. Matthew Hewlett, Jeremy Ferguson, Linda Oxley, Cathy Simmons, and Dylan Mann formed the new nonprofit. It incorporated late in 2024 and won a Woodard Family Foundation grant to create the director’s position. The organization estimated attendance at the 2026 festival at more than 30,000. The 68th Bohemia Mining Days is set for July 15–17, 2027, in Coiner Park.