Festival of America

On the Fourth of July the Visitor Center Park below Grand Coulee Dam fills with people on the lawn, vendors’ booths and a line for food. The Grand Coulee Dam Area Chamber of Commerce holds the Festival of America here every year on that date. The 2025 festival, a one-day show on Friday, July 4, ran from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. Handmade crafts, local food and children’s activities filled the hours from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., and the face-painting booth drew the younger crowd. The beer garden poured from noon to 10. Near the park entrance that day, a pair of ospreys fed their chicks above the people below.

The stage ran from noon into the evening. Fuel for Ghosts, a local rock band, played originals and covers from noon to 2. Musicians of the U.S. Army from Camp Lewis McCord, listed on the program as America’s First Corps Band, played from 3 to 5. The Vaughn Jensen Band took the 7 to 9 set.

Two laser shows and a crest of fireworks

After dark the program moves to the face of the dam. The Bureau of Reclamation projects a seasonal laser show, “One River, Many Voices,” onto the dam on summer nights; it resumed for 2026 on May 22. On festival night in 2025 the bureau ran two shows: the current one, in use since 2014, at 9:30, and the original 1989 show at 10. Fireworks were set for 10:30, launched off the top of the dam while Stan Cass sang. The Star once printed a 30-second exposure from 2022 of people watching fireworks shoot from the dam’s top.

By day the Visitor Center itself is open, with hands-on exhibits on the cultural, natural and construction history of the dam.

A model dam runs again

For the nation’s 250th anniversary the festival ran three days, July 2 to 4, 2026, in partnership with the Bureau of Reclamation. It spread over a larger footprint, added vendors, artisans and entertainment, and closed with what the chamber called its largest fireworks show ever. The chamber pitched the trip to Seattle families as a drive of 3.5 to 4.5 hours. It also warned that hotels, RV parks and campgrounds fill early over the Fourth of July weekend. The Lake Roosevelt Forum reported nearly 30,000 visitors from across the Northwest. The towns of Coulee Dam, Grand Coulee and Electric City shared in putting it on with the chamber and Reclamation.

That weekend a ribbon-cutting set the historic Grand Coulee Model Dam running for the first time in decades. The 1/60-scale hydraulic model was built before the Nathaniel “Nat” Washington Power Plant was added to the dam. In the dam’s early years engineers ran numerous hydraulic studies on it to see how water moved through the dam and what it did to the riverbed downstream. Hundreds of visitors stopped through the weekend to watch it run.

Water slides and a beer garden on the move

The crowds have grown over a decade. In December 2014, after the Electric City council voted to hold its tourism spending from hotel and motel taxes at 50 percent, chamber executive director Peggy Nevsimal said the decision would likely cut into broadcast advertising. “The money we spent this year on broadcast advertising directly influenced our huge success for Festival of America attendance (300% increase),” she wrote.

In 2016 the festival ran two days, Sunday, July 3, and Monday, July 4. The chamber added a water park of inflatable slides from Jump N2 Fun of Post Falls, Idaho, set up in the park below the Visitor Center. It had a splash pool and a four-way teeter-totter under a sprayer. Michael Hunt, who brought the inflatables, had supplied nine of them to the Colorama event and looked forward to coming back. He and his wife, Julie, had married on July 4. “We will also be celebrating our 26th wedding anniversary,” he told The Star. That same year the beer garden moved. The year before it had stood in the parking lot of Coulee Dam’s maintenance garage. The town council approved the chamber’s request to put it in the front lot of the Melody Restaurant instead, with the restaurant to serve a light menu. From the tent, visitors could watch both the laser show and the fireworks over the dam.

The Star headlined its July 2021 coverage “Festival of America returns.” That year brought giant waterslides, vendors, games, and music by Lila Rose, Jesse Quandt and Hometown Hooligans.

The trailer that drove off

The 2025 festival drew thousands. The crowd on the lawn could not see the week its organizers had. Krystal and Jillian Fillis, the chamber’s executive directors in training, had a list to finish by Thursday. On Monday morning they found the chamber’s beer-garden equipment gone: the big tent, the chairs, the tables, the fencing, and the trailer they were stored in. Someone had backed up to the trailer’s hitch and driven off with it.

People chipped in, and by showtime the beer garden stood on borrowed and rented gear. Few vendors came. Some declined, citing the previous year’s heat, and one canceled on Thursday because she had Covid. Those who came stayed busy. A bad valve in the water system dropped the pressure, so the kids’ water toys moved to another spot and were cut to a couple. The children played in them anyway. The weather held, and the beer garden ran out of some beers. The town was full of people and short of parking spaces. The chamber put attendance at about 15,000.

“Up until the fireworks started, it was fantastic,” Fillis told The Star. The plan had been to light the fireworks at 10:30, after both laser shows. Reclamation had offered to run the 1989 show alongside the newer one, and people were excited to see it again. Instead the fuses were lit shortly after the first show ended. The old show, with “Coming to America” and other songs playing along, was disrupted and hard to hear. Fillis guessed that a pause between the shows led the pyrotechnicians to think it was time, though the contract specified 10:30. “That’s the only thing I can think of,” she said.

By the following Tuesday police had found a suspect in the trailer theft, a local man. He confessed and told them where he had left the equipment. Chairs were in two places. The steel poles had gone to a recycler in Wenatchee. The trailer, with the tables still inside, was parked behind a JC Penney store there. The big tent lay in a ditch in Mansfield.

The chamber thanked its helpers on Facebook: “Here’s to small towns with big hearts - and a 4th of July celebration we’ll never forget. Already counting down to 2026.”