Corning Olive Festival and Car Show

Check-in for the car show opens at 8 in the morning at Lennox Fields, 1624 Houghton Avenue, and not a minute before. The Chamber’s page says so in capital letters. Cars, lowriders, muscle cars, rat rods, imports and trucks pull in, and the Chamber invites tractors as well. Anything built from 1900 to the present can be judged, in Stock and Modified, once a category draws five judged entries. Non-judged entries are free. The categories posted for the 2026 show run by era: 1949 and older, the 1950s, the 1960s, and 1970 through 1999. They add Best Paint Job and Best Rust Bucket / Under Construction. Judging and awards begin at 1 p.m. The top entry in each category takes $150 in cash, and Best of Show and People’s Choice take $500 each. Part of that money comes from shirts sold at the Chamber office in black or burnt orange, $20 apiece, with all proceeds going to the car show awards. Live music and food and beverage vendors, beer among them, work the car-show side.

A footbridge crosses from Lennox Fields to Corning Community Park, the skate park, at 1485 Toomes Avenue. The Olive Festival runs there from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and the car show closes with it. Admission is free. In September 2026 the Chamber reported its vendor spots sold out, with 100 artisans, retailers, nonprofits and community organizations. The park also holds a food court, live music, a Kid Zone, a large raffle at the Chamber booth, and the Rotary’s Annual Olive Drop. Earlier editions show what the tents carry: olive oil, olive soap, and olive wreaths, which the Corning High School FFA chapter sold in 2021. Parking at both parks is short. Cars go to the Olive Pit for the day, and a shuttle runs continuously to the Corning Community Park bus stop.

The festival on Saturday, October 10, 2026, is the 79th. The Corning Chamber of Commerce runs it from an office at 1110 Solano Street. Its homepage calls the town the Olive City, “Home of the Queen Olive,” and its event listing says the festival honors more than 100 years of that heritage.

A clue, a bed race, a cruise night

The Saturday closes a week of events. In 2026 the week begins Monday, October 5, at 6 p.m., when the Chamber posts the first clue to the Hidden Olive Hunt on its Facebook page. On Tuesday, October 6, the Tuesday Night Market holds its closing night on Solano Street. At 6 p.m. the “Corning Does It Bedder” bed races run down Solano from 4th to 3rd Street, the original course, which the races went back to the year before because of construction on the Rec Plaza. A team has four people, and riders switch halfway and change t-shirts. Teams bring their own beds. The Chamber points them to the Swap Shop at the landfill and the thrift stores, and tells them to “get to welding.” On Friday evening a Cruise Night Show ‘n Shine and mixer takes place downtown, with no entry fee and no need to be entered in Saturday’s show.

A hall for the Catholic church

Accounts of the beginning differ by a year or two. Christina Hale, the Chamber’s executive manager, told KRCR in 2021 that it started in 1946. “It started with the women from the catholic church. They were raising up money to build a new hall. They got together with some of the olive growers. They made some crafts and bakeries and stuff and started this event,” Hale said. “After the hall was built they didn’t have the purpose for the event no more, so then the chamber and other groups started taking it over and it’s grown to this.”

The Red Bluff Daily News, in a 2016 story carried by the Times-Standard, put the first festival in 1945. By that account the church held it at the Veterans Hall in October, right after the olive harvest. In time it grew too big for the hall, moved to a park, and eventually moved to August. The Chico Enterprise-Record wrote in 2023 that the festival had run annually since 1947. KRCR called it the longest-running olive festival in the nation.

Pit spitting, and the move back to October

Photographs from the 2015 festival show Chamber board member Christina Meeds passing out olives for the olive pit spitting contest. In another, Cheyenne Boles, Miss Corning for 2014–2015, prepares to try her hand at it. The Main Street Band played that year, and Tonantzin, an Aztec dance group out of Corning, performed. While the festival was held in August, the Miss Corning contest was tied to it.

In 2016 Solano Street was undergoing a major overhaul, and the Chamber took the chance to return the festival to its harvest roots. It set the date for Oct. 8 and the site at the Corning Skate Park on Toomes Avenue. The parade moved from the Friday evening before to 9 a.m. on festival day, on Solano Street. Councilman Tony Cardenas, organizing that year, said the bed races, live music, dancing, children’s games and vendors would stay. He hoped the new site would bring other events into the week before, among them a skate event and a water festival. Paulyne White, another organizer, said the raffle would carry items that appealed to more people. Lucero Olive Oil, on Loleta Avenue, held a mixer the Thursday before and a dinner on the Friday.

A dry year and a full return

The festival lay idle in 2020. The 74th, in October 2021, was the first full return. Over 90 vendors lined the entry, from as far as Sacramento and Oregon and as near as the park’s backyard. The car show next door drew nearly 100 entries. California was in drought, and patrons who came every year noticed fewer olive vendors. Jessanna Levitsky sold produce from Heartbeat Farm all day. Her domestic well had run dry, and the family depended on its agricultural well both to grow and to live, which left less water for the olive trees. “Some of the trees it seems aren’t really producing any,” Levitsky said, standing outside her tent. “It’s made us kind of unsure of how much we should invest into planting not knowing what we’re going to be able to get from it.”

Two years later, on October 7, 2023, fifth-grader Allie Morgan and her brother Matthew, a third-grader, sold homemade goodies at the festival to benefit the Corning 4-H, of which both were members.