Constitution Day Weekend

At half past one on the Sunday of Constitution Day Weekend, Masons in Colonial attire gather at the corner of Broad and Pine streets in Nevada City. Under the direction of George Washington, they reenact the signing of the United States Constitution. The ceremony is brief. At two o’clock the parade starts down Broad Street through the historic downtown, with marching bands, floats, antique autos, equestrians and politicians. In 2018 the Chamber of Commerce counted 60 to 70 entries, among them student and local bands and reenactments of historical moments.

Masons and kazoos on Broad Street

Masonic groups march in numbers: the local lodges, Eastern Star, Scottish Rite Masons, Knights Templar, Shriners, and the youth groups DeMolay and Job’s Daughters. The Ben Ali Shrine Club has brought its go-cart unit. Marching Masons hand children along the route copies of a study guide to the U.S. Constitution. Since 1990 the Grand Master of Masons in California has by tradition served as Grand Marshal; in 2018 that was Bruce Galloway. In 2009 the Ophir Prison Marching Kazoo Band was named among the crowd favorites.

The Famous Marching Presidents come near the end. “The Chamber of Commerce likes to put us toward the back, and it’s flattering that their reason is that the crowd anticipates (us),” said David Parker, the group’s founder. The Chamber advises arriving about an hour before parade time to find a place along the route.

Nevada City lies on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada, midway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Representative Tom McClintock told the House in 2009 that the town, with a population of 3,001, “swells to 10,000 or more on Constitution Day.” The day itself is September 17, the date in 1787 when, in McClintock’s account, thirty-nine delegates from twelve states signed the Constitution at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Nevada City holds its observance on the nearest weekend. The 2026 weekend fell on September 19 and 20, with the theme “Life, Liberty, & the Pursuit of Happiness” to mark the 250th anniversary.

The Chamber calls the celebration “reported to be the oldest and largest Constitution observance in the western United States.” A 2019 Chamber notice went further and called it “quite possibly” one of the oldest and largest in the entire country. Parker has said Nevada City is the only town west of the Mississippi to mark the day with a formal parade. In 2023 The Union reported it as one of only two towns in the United States to observe the holiday with a parade.

Other things happen on the parade afternoon. The 49er Rotary Club runs a carnival and a duck race on Deer Creek. In 2017 the Grand Isle Fire Brigade played in front of the National Hotel after the last entry passed. On Sunday a free shuttle runs to downtown from the county government center on Maidu Avenue.

Camp at Pioneer Park, band on Pine Street

The weekend begins on Saturday morning at Pioneer Park. The Delaware Regiment of the Brigade of the American Revolution sets up camp there and drills and fires muskets. Children drill with mock muskets, and the California Consolidated Drum Band plays. The encampment runs all of Saturday and into Sunday morning. In 2018 both Continental and British camps stood open for visitors to walk through, with battle skirmishes and demonstrations of late-1700s surgical instruments and the spinning of cotton and wool. Members of the Daughters of the Revolution and Sons of the Revolution were on hand that year to explain how to trace Revolutionary War ancestors. The Chamber noted it was the sixth year that militia had performed. In 2009, by McClintock’s account, members of the American Civil War Association staged the living history and battle reenactments, with more than 200 military and settler reenactors expected.

Late Saturday afternoon the Nevada County Concert Band gives a free open-air concert on Pine Street. A few chairs are provided, and the Chamber advises bringing your own. In 2022 the Watsonville Community Band shared the program on North Pine Street.

Colonel Lambert’s lodge

The parade was conceived in 1967 by Col. William H. “Bill” Lambert, a member of Nevada Lodge No. 13. The lodge dates to 1850, and Lambert was its Worshipful Master in 1966 and again in 1972. By the Masons’ account, he held the Constitution to be the framework of the democratic process and personally offered financial support for the celebration. The Chamber’s version gives him a partner: city manager Beryl Robinson, also a member of the Nevada City lodge, who with Lambert started the parade together with the Revolutionary War living history.

The Masons credit Lambert’s efforts for Nevada City’s recognition by the National Bicentennial Commission, one of a few communities west of the Rockies so recognized. At the Bicentennial in 1976, the city council, Robinson, and the Chamber of Commerce joined the observance. Past Master George Harper and his wife, Pat, soon took over as coordinators and served nearly a decade, recruiting entries each year. The Chamber now manages the weekend. The Grand Lodge of California lists the parade on its official calendar and calls it “a great example of Masonry in Action.”

Two lodges meet today at the Nevada City Masonic Center: Nevada Lodge No. 13 and Mountain Range Lodge No. 18, established 1852. In Grass Valley meets Madison Lodge No. 23, established 1853 and named for James Madison, “Father of the Constitution.”

Presidents from the Miners Foundry

Parker told The Union in 2023 how his group began. The Masons, he said, “had clowns, they had people in go-karts and they came from all over northern California for years, for decades. Busloads of them would show up to be in the parade. They probably outnumbered locals 30 to one.”

“I used to live up on Boulder Street and the buses (of parade goers) would park up there,” he went on. “It was a rainy day and I realized that we had very little local participation. I thought we need a local group. It’s 1988 and I literally bolted up in the middle of the night and blurted out ‘The Famous Marching Presidents!’”

Parker is an artist and calls the group an art project. He was Nevada City’s vice mayor when he founded it and later served as mayor. Through its run he has played Martin Van Buren. The group portrays each president with his first lady, “with reverence, good humor and varying degrees of historical accuracy,” as The Union put it in 2025, by which time there were 47 presidents to fill. When Donald Trump first joined the line in 2017, Nevada City resident Rick Ewald played him and Stephanie Siehr of Grass Valley played Melania Trump. In 2023 the group honored Herbert Hoover, the only president, Parker said, yet to have lived in Nevada City. Work begins as early as March. On parade Sunday the presidents gather in costume at the Miners Foundry for photographs, where Parker said in 2023 they had met for 28 years. “We celebrate the three Cs: community, country, and constitution,” he said. “And we do it in a way that’s serious but not too serious.”

The cartoonist R.L. Crabb joined in 1993 and has drawn a new logo every year since. The group’s Official Seal followed in 1996. One of his favorite logos shows Bill Clinton asking John F. Kennedy for advice. The 2019 logo marked fifty years since Apollo 11.

In 2023 Parker said the group was ready to pass the torch and hoped “to transform the group to 30 or 40-something kids.” He added, “I am definitely a senior citizen.”

Each year the Marching Presidents also give the Col. Bill Lambert Award for service to the community. Recipients have included Beryl Robinson, George and Pat Harper, R.L. Crabb, and the folksinger U Utah Phillips. The 2025 award went to Tom Durkin, a newspaperman who once lived out of his car and in 2021 founded the No Place To Go Project for the county’s homeless. Durkin and Uncle Sam led the presidents down Broad Street that year, and Parker presented the award at the banquet at the Miners Foundry afterward. “I’m just trying to help people,” Durkin said, “and be out there speaking for people who can’t speak for themselves.”