Elbert Day Festival

Elbert Day begins at eight in the morning with breakfast. The Elbert Woman’s Club hosts a hometown breakfast before anything else on the program happens, and it sells homemade goods through the rest of the day. At the 2022 festival, tables stood both inside and outside the Russell Gates Mercantile Co. building for the pancake breakfast. Diane Daugherty of the club worked the griddle, and the locally owned Dancing Jaguar Coffee parked its truck outside. That morning the club raised more than $1,000 toward upgrades for the Russell Gates building. The mercantile went up in 1906. It now serves as a community gathering place, and the Woman’s Club continues to restore it.

Elbert is a small ranching and farming community south of Kiowa on Elbert Road, east of Colorado Springs and Denver, in the valley of Kiowa Creek. The festival fills its downtown from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on one Saturday in July. The 2026 festival fell on July 11. Admission is free. The organizers bill it as “a day of country fun in the historic town of Elbert.”

Flyover, parade, and the car show at the school

After breakfast an aircraft makes a flyover above the town, and then the parade comes through. The Elbert Town Committee called the 2026 parade the largest in Elbert Day history and later posted aerial footage of it, thanking whoever had captured “our best parade yet” from the sky. The 2022 parade gives an idea of its makeup. Spectators lined North Elbert Road. The parade had homemade floats, horses, a cowboy, a float from the Elbert Creekside 4H, first responders, the Elbert County Fair queen waving to the crowd, and vintage cars from the Pikes Peak Chapter of the Vintage Motor Car Club of America. Most riders and walkers threw candy, and children gathered it up along the route.

At 10 a.m., right after the parade, the car show opens in the Elbert School Parking Lot. A shuttle runs all day between the school lot and the vendor area downtown. The sources disagree on the car show’s age. A poster carried by the Elbert Fire Protection District advertised the 2026 event as the “2nd Annual Car Show.” The Town Committee’s own post after the 2026 festival listed the car show among its new attractions that year.

The vendor area holds a local marketplace and food vendors. The committee counted a record 57 vendors in 2026. The day’s program also includes a tractor pull, a pie eating contest, games, live music, and other entertainment. After the 2026 festival the committee asked people to post their photographs, with “Bonus PTS for Pie Eating Contest.” The children’s area was expanded in 2026 with bounce houses, face painting, and foam cannons. The 2022 program had a pancake race, an egg toss, a watermelon seed-spitting contest, and a beer garden, and the throwback rock cover band Lookin’ Back played. The newspaper account calls that July 9 “a scorching Saturday” and reports hundreds of people coming in from all around Elbert County.

Gomer’s Gulch, a railroad, and the 1935 flood

The Town Committee gives the town’s history in brief. The community was settled around 1860 in the Kiowa Creek valley and was first called Gomer’s Gulch, after Gomer’s Sawmill. It had a post office, stores, gambling halls, and saloons. The town was later moved a short distance down the creek and renamed Elbert. In the 1880s the Denver and New Orleans Railroad, later the Colorado and Southern, built a line from Denver to Pueblo with a stop at Elbert. The town then grew to three large mercantile stores, the Russell Gates Mercantile Company among them, along with two banks, a post office, two creameries, and two hotels.

Memorial Day weekend of 1935 followed a month of nonstop rain. That weekend 24 more inches fell in less than six hours. Kiowa Creek flooded the town and destroyed many businesses and homes. The flood damaged the railroad tracks badly enough that the line was abandoned, and the tracks were eventually torn up.

Many of the buildings that survived the flood still stand. The Presbyterian Church, built in 1889, is on the National Register of Historic Places, and Sacred Heart Catholic Church has been restored. The old post office now houses a cafe. The Elbert Mercantile is now the South Forty Saloon. The old lumber shed holds City Limit Antiques & Reclaimed Materials. At the edge of what locals call the Elbert Triangle, the HI-TEST gas station, one of the 2026 festival’s Diamond Sponsors, still has an attendant serve customers at the pump instead of offering pay-at-the-pump.

The Town Committee and its festival

The Elbert Town Committee is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. A group of residents formed it to bring tourism to Elbert and to improve the town for residents and visitors alike. Its stated mission is “To Reach, Connect and Celebrate Community and To Promote The Historic and Rural Town Of Elbert.” The committee’s members plan and run Elbert Day as volunteers. Lacey Catterton is president, Marie Williams vice president, Angie White secretary, and Wendy Walp treasurer. The other members are Dug Graham, Christopher Williams, Sascha Beaver, Tracy Tjapkes, Tara Wille, and Irene Brown. By the committee’s count, its 2026 team was the largest it has had.

Colorado Community Media reported in 2022 that the festival “has taken place on and off since 2014.” An earlier record also exists. The Elbert County Historical Society’s fall 2011 newsletter lists Elbert Day among the events where the county museum set up a booth that summer. The museum showed old tool displays there and gave away a $15 gift certificate in a drawing, which Kathy Andrews of Sedalia won.

In 2022, proceeds from many of the festival’s paid activities went toward preserving historical items connected with the Town of Elbert. “The group works hard all year long to put on this event,” Walp said that year. “We want to preserve Elbert’s heritage and share it with people today and in the future.” Irene Brown, then quoted as a member of the Elbert Woman’s Club, described the visitors who come: “The event makes our town accessible to people. There are people who come to the event from other cities that would never visit our community otherwise.”