Creswell 4th of July Celebration

The Fourth of July in Creswell starts with a pancake breakfast in Harry Holt Memorial Park, on North 4th Street. Travel Oregon advises coming early to claim a spot on the sidewalk. The parade follows, with floats, local organizations, classic cars and a military flyover. Afterward the day moves back to Holt Park for live music, food and beverage, and local vendors, and fireworks at dusk close it. The Creswell Chamber of Commerce runs the event, which its own site calls the town’s annual 4th of July picnic.

The 2026 celebration ran from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. on July 4 under the banner “Creswell~The Place to be to Celebrate 250,” marking 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. KEZI reported thousands in town and a parade that took about an hour and a half to pass through downtown. Sarah Mishler, a Navy veteran who had been bringing her family for about a decade, told the station: “There’s always really good floats and my kids enjoy it. They love to get the candy and play with the bubbles and the water guns.” Maleki Stayton, who grew up in Creswell, said people “from everywhere are coming here to celebrate not only our country but also our community.”

Fire danger was elevated that summer. On June 26 the chamber announced that the State of Oregon had approved its fireworks permit after months of planning with the Lane County Fire Marshal. The shells were chosen for reduced fallout and were launched only from a blacktop surface. The safety perimeter around the launch was widened, and fire crews and emergency responders were stationed through the evening.

A fire truck from Florida

The parade’s age depends on who is counting. The chamber told KEZI it has been a tradition since 1910. The Chronicle, in a 2021 history by Catherine Russell, dates it to July 4, 1992. In that account Laurie Moore says there had been other events in town around the Fourth before then, “but there wasn’t a parade or anything.”

Creswell’s older summer event was the Creswell Air Fair at Hobby Field, out on Melton Road. Dr. Richard Page, a dentist in town until 2012 and a chamber member, said the fair grew larger and more expensive until one summer in the late 1980s it was “completely rained out.” “That was the end of an era,” he said. Shelly Humble became airport manager in 1997, after the fair had faded. “The biggest problem with the air fair is that they never made any money,” she said. Page remembers the fair as tied to the Fourth celebration, or as the thing that led to it. Humble remembers the two as always separate.

According to Dan Moore, the 1992 parade began with a levy. Early that year, he told the paper, voters approved money for a new fire truck, “the first one they bought in 20 years” and “the first ladder truck they ever had.” Moore was a farmer and volunteer firefighter who had come to Creswell as a teenager in 1973. In June he and fellow volunteer Paul Furrer went to Florida, where the truck was being built, to oversee its final details. Back home, Laurie Moore said, the plan was “to present the fire truck to the town, and to thank the town for voting to allow the purchase of the truck.”

No one was sure the truck would arrive in time. It crossed the country and stopped in Portland for extra gear. Once its arrival looked certain, Laurie went to work from the family auto parts store. “Customers were coming into the store,” she said, “and we’d say, ‘Hey, you have this great car. Would you like to join the parade?’”

On July 4, 1992, fire trucks came from Coburg, Pleasant Hill, Eastern Lane, Lane Rural, Fern Ridge, Crow Valley, Santa Clara, Western Lane, Lorane and more. Behind them came a VFW color guard, vintage cars, hay wagons, logging trucks, hot rods, local merchants, and kids on go-carts and bicycles. By Laurie Moore’s estimate the whole parade lasted maybe 20 minutes. “There wasn’t any great plan to have it every year or anything,” said Clint Fisk, who had moved to town in 1990, “but they had this great fire truck and they were proud of it.”

Water spouts, horses, and a banner run twice

The next year people started asking when the parade would be. The fire department agreed to sponsor it, and the Moores became, in Laurie’s words, “the lead family in it,” at the head of an all-volunteer crew. Dan joked that they started stacking up entries in June, “June for the following year.” There was never an entry fee, so that kids could take part. Local businesses covered the costs, and their names went on a banner that Rainbow Graphics made each year and that traveled the parade route twice. The organizers kept horses away from the front of the fire trucks, assigned someone to scoop manure, and adjusted the route for long trucks and trailers that could not make tight corners.

Jessica Landstra, the Moores’ daughter, remembers a brush-fire truck with a water spout on the front. It would stop and spray the crowd at almost a sprinkler setting. Page recalled grownups “getting drenched on the sidelines.” Laurie said they had to “tighten the reins when some people started getting a little bit carried away with it.” As a child Landstra had sensitive hearing, and her mother remembered sitting inside a fire truck “with my hands over her ears through all the fireworks.” Landstra founded Farmlands Market in 2014, and later she stored and sliced the ham for the breakfast.

The breakfast and a festival in the park grew up alongside the parade. Humble worked the Fourth from 2001 on, apart from a couple of years after she left the chamber board. She laid out the day: volunteers arrived at 6:30, breakfast wrapped by 10:30, and the parade started at 11. Then the grills were hauled out of the way so the vendors could have the rest of the day. The fireworks were paid for with a Memorial Day hot dog sale, T-shirts and buttons. “It was a lot, a lot, a lot of work,” she said. Dr. Sheri Schlorman of Creswell Veterinary Hospital later took over the breakfast. She started planning in April and had the next year organized by mid-June. By about 2015 or 2016, Laurie Moore told the paper, the parade had grown big enough to need more help, and logistics and some politics came into play.

Lights, siren, and a sheriff on horseback

A sheriff’s deputy leads the parade. Sgt. Scott Denham worked his first Creswell parade in 2012, three days into his assignment as one of two full-time deputies in the area. That morning Deputy Dan Olsen told him he always led the parade and cleared the route. When Olsen retired, the job passed to Denham. In a 2021 piece for The Chronicle, Denham described his first time at the front. He shined his patrol car and stopped at Holt Park, where Kiwanis and chamber volunteers were serving breakfast to a long line of early risers, and handed out stickers to kids. He told the Scouts not to try to keep up with him. At 1100 hours he turned on his red and blue lights, gave a couple of short blasts of the siren, and the parade moved off. “On this particular day,” he wrote, “my arm got tired.”

He returned to Creswell as a sergeant in 2016 and spent months each year planning with the chamber. Over the years he rode the route on a police bicycle and was hit with a water gun on a hot day. One year Sheriff Trapp, after riding with the posse in the parade, helped stop a drunk driver who was speeding toward the park. Trapp was on horseback. “That is true Sheriffing!” Denham wrote.

A mill site for the fireworks

The pandemic put much of the celebration on hold in 2020 and 2021. In the spring of 2021 the usual fireworks site, on Creswell School District property, was also in doubt. A new chamber board formed that April, and its first task was finding a place to launch the show. Daniel Basaraba had just bought the old Bald Knob mill site, and after reading in The Chronicle that there might be no display, he offered the grounds. “I know how important the Fourth of July is to Creswell,” he said.

The new chamber president, Bobby Langley, had moved from Tennessee a year earlier and had not yet seen a Creswell Fourth. Neighbors had told him about the airplanes at the airport, the pancake breakfast in the park and the big fireworks at the school. Danny Solesbee, fire marshal for South Lane County Fire & Rescue, signed off on the permits. The chamber suggested watching from the TJ’s Restaurant parking lot, downtown, the Tractor Supply lot and Garden Lake Park.

Travel Oregon lists the next parade for July 4, 2027, with the breakfast, vendors and fireworks again at Holt Park.