Cranberry Festival

On the Saturday morning of the Bandon Cranberry Festival, parade entries gather in front of Bandon High School on 9th Street SW. Check-in opens at 8, judging begins at 9:15, and at 10 the Cranberry Parade steps off up Highway 101 and through Old Town. Entries compete for first- and second-place ribbons in each category and a Grand Marshal award, with no cash prizes. The Bandon Chamber of Commerce, which runs the festival, advises spectators to come early because “locals know the best locations fill up fast.” The Chamber counted the 2026 festival, held September 12 and 13, as the 80th annual. Bandon has about 3,000 residents. State figures put attendance over the main weekend at 10,000 to 16,500, and about 59 percent of visitor days came from people traveling more than 50 miles, from Medford, Grants Pass, Roseburg, Eugene, and Portland, and from as far as Seattle and Redding.

Coronation, kitchen, and kickoff

The festival starts before the crowds arrive. On Thursday evening the Cranberry Court is crowned at the Sprague Community Theater. The court is drawn from juniors at Bandon and Pacific High Schools. They earn scholarships, train for months in public speaking, talent, and pageantry, and appear at events around Coos County before one is crowned Cranberry Queen or King. Friday morning the Cranberry Kitchen contest is held at the VFW Hall on Bates Road. Cooks of any age enter sweet or savory dishes in seven categories, and the overall winner is named Queen or King of the Kitchen. Friday closes with the Cranberry Bowl football game at Bandon High School. The World newspaper reports that winners of the court and the kitchen have traditionally been announced at its halftime.

On Saturday and Sunday the festival moves to Old Town and the Port of Bandon waterfront. The car show follows the parade and gives Best of Decade awards to models from before the 1940s to the present. Its entrants are urged to drive in the parade first. A juried marketplace of artists, craftspeople, and food and beverage vendors is open 11 to 6 on Saturday and 10 to 4 on Sunday. The weekend also brings a farm equipment expo, a quilt show, art exhibits, live music, an evening street dance, and the Team Todd Corn Hole Contest. The Chamber calls the cranberry-eating contest “bitterly-sweet” and “locally-famous.” Entries for it, as for the corn hole, are taken at the Cranberry Headquarters tent.

The crop being celebrated grows in the bogs around town. Oregon is the third-largest cranberry producer in the country, and the Bandon area grows about 90 percent of the state’s crop. Oregon ArtsWatch dates the state’s first cranberry farm to 1885, when Charles McFarlin planted cuttings from Massachusetts in Coos County. The city’s timeline records a first growers’ cooperative in the early 1930s. In 1946 Ocean Spray offered membership to Oregon growers, which opened a national market to them. By 1970 Bandon had been dubbed the cranberry capital of Oregon.

A meeting called by the Western World

A forest fire on September 26, 1936, destroyed about 80 percent of Bandon and killed eleven people. The city’s timeline gives the years 1936 to 1946 to rebuilding. Then, in its October 9, 1947, edition, the Western World invited the heads of all community organizations to a meeting to hear a proposal about a Cranberry Festival. A week later the paper reported that a Cranberry Festival Association had been formed, officers elected, and dates set for November 14 and 15.

A full-page ad on October 30 announced the “Big Three Events”: the queen coronation and ball, the Cranberry Bowl football game, and the Cranberry Festival dance at The Barn. The Barn dated from 1942, when horse and dog patrols were quartered in City Park while Bandon was fortified during the Second World War. The Bandon History Museum says the barn built for the horses later became the heart of the community building in the park. Ruth Kreutzer was crowned the first Cranberry Queen in the elementary school gym before 700 people. In the game, Myrtle Creek beat Bandon 13 to 9 for the right to represent Coos, Curry, and Douglas counties in the state B-League playoffs. At halftime the new Cranberry Bowl Athletic Field, west of the elementary school, was dedicated to Bandon High School. Earlier seasons had been played in City Park.

The city, the museum, the state, and the Chamber all give 1947 for that first festival. Oregon ArtsWatch, writing in 2026, says the festival has been held every September since 1946. The count also differs between sources: the Chamber billed the 2026 festival as the 80th annual, while The World, in June 2026, called it the 79th installment.

Firemen at Lloyd’s Café

The parade was added in 1948, the second year. According to museum volunteer Jim Proehl, that festival was again held in November to mark the end of the cranberry harvest. ArtsWatch writes instead that the festival began as a way to commemorate the beginning of the harvest season. Thirty entries, among them floats, horses, and farm equipment, formed near the Coast Guard Station. The VFW posts of Bandon and Coquille provided the color guard, and Lou Wright conducted the Bandon High marching band. Queen Lois Blakely and her court rode in a Packard convertible driven by Martin Krannick, whose name the museum’s newsletter spells Kranick. Dayton Turner and Hank Dufort wore suits made of newspaper to represent the Western World. The paper described the Bandon Variety Store’s entry as “a girl-bedecked car.” Judy Brown, later Bandon’s mayor under the name Judy Densmore, won the award for best children’s entry with a decorated tricycle.

About the time the parade reached Lloyd’s Café, a box in the street was set on fire. The fire department then gave what the Western World called “a Keystone Comedy style demonstration of how not to put out a fire.” The November 11 edition went on: “The smoke eaters put on a wild show with men running up ladders with disconnected lengths of hose, etc. in a mock effort to squelch the blaze.” The headline read “Firemen Add Thrills To Large Parade.” Photographs of that parade, donated by Carol Vedder, are now in the museum’s collection.

Gowns, negatives, and a state banner

In 1949 Queen Joan DeCosta was escorted by Pete Goodbrod. In 2016, at a festival themed “Cheers to 70 Years,” Pete and Joan Goodbrod were the parade’s Grand Marshals. The Bandon History Museum, at 270 Fillmore Avenue SE, mounts a Cranberry Festival exhibit each August and September. It shows Cranberry Court gowns from the 1950s to the present alongside the museum’s standing exhibit on cranberry growing. The archive holds thousands of festival photographs, drawn largely from the Mary Schamehorn photo collection and from negatives donated by the Western World. The museum’s 2016 newsletter noted that the paper spent more film on the festival than on any other event.

On June 11, 2026, the Oregon Heritage Commission announced the festival as an Oregon Heritage Tradition. It was the 30th in the state, joining a list that includes the Pendleton Round-Up and Medford’s Pear Blossom Festival. “The designation recognizes those traditions that have been ongoing for 50 years or more, add to the livability and identity of the state, and has a public profile that distinguishes it from other events,” said commission coordinator Katie Henry. The state’s announcement named five events that have continued from the festival’s first two years: the court and coronation, the Cranberry Bowl, the dance, the Grand Parade, and the Cranberry Kitchen. The commission was to present the designation banner during the September 12–13 festival. Mary Schamehorn, mayor of Bandon and in 2016 vice president of the museum’s board, said of the honor: “When I was born, my parents lived on their cranberry bog, which my father built. For years, he was the manager of Ocean Spray cranberries, so that little red berry has meant a lot to me through the years.”