Fortuna Apple Harvest Festival

On the first Saturday of October, Main Street in Fortuna is closed to cars between 9th and 14th streets and given over to foot traffic. The Fortuna Downtown Business Association calls it an “old fashion street fair.” Booths sell jewelry, woodwork, plants, wind chimes and clothing. The merchants behind the storefronts open their own doors, and some put apple dishes on their menus for the day. At the 2026 festival, held October 3, the downtown program included an apple pie eating contest, a baked goods contest in its first year, a DJ from Travisty Entertainment, music by the Knights of Van Duzen, free bounce houses and face painting, sidewalk chalk for children, and a sensory booth run by the Humboldt Autism Alliance.

Three stops on the People Mover

The festival is spread across Fortuna in three places. A free People Mover shuttle, provided by the Apple Harvest Committee and the Humboldt Senior Center, runs among Main Street at 12th, Clendenen’s Cider Works, and the Rec Hall at Rohner Park. Dogs are asked to stay home. The festival’s own history page still describes free hayride transportation between venues. In 2022, KRCR reported, there were no hay wagons, and a shuttle ran in their place.

At Rohner Park on the afternoon of the 2026 festival, Mike Craghead carved pumpkins in front of onlookers, the Scream-A-Torium put up an inflatable spooky maze, and the Kiwanis ran a pumpkin patch. Children had free crafts and sensory play. Stands sold caramel apples, cotton candy and crepes. The Irie Rockerz played from 4:30 to 6 p.m. The schedule counted it the 41st annual festival, while the festival website’s home page called it the 40th.

The orchard on 12th Street

Clendenen’s Cider Works stands just north of Highway 101 at the 12th Street intersection, and the festival began there. On festival day the retail store opens in the morning with cider, apples, local produce and baked goods. The 2026 program added cider slushies, apple dumplings, narrated orchard tours, Fat Anne’s food truck, and live music from noon. A stand of homemade caramel apples raised money for the FUHS Class of 2027 Safe & Sober Grad.

According to the family, Ernest Clifton and May Long Clendenen bought a producing apple orchard in Fortuna in 1909. They grew Minkler, Smith’s Cider and Stark apples and shipped them boxed, and before long they were pressing cider. The cider is pure and unpasteurized. Drew Clendenen told the Times-Standard in 2018 that the property was first purchased in 1908 and that its original orchard dated to 1869. Some of those trees still bear. The farm now grows about 30 varieties. Drew calls Fuji, Pink Lady and Granny Smith the “moderns”; the older sorts include Mutsu, Spitzenberg and Bellflower. Apples from other orchards, some local and some from Sonoma County, go into the blend. The store is open from mid-August through January.

The press is from 1916. Drew said it has been kept running with the help of “a good welder and machinist.” “Living on a farm, you learn to do everything yourself,” he said. A photograph on the festival’s history page shows Andy Clendenen pressing apples with the Mount Gilead Cider and Fruit Press.

The cider works belongs to an older Humboldt County trade. The Humboldt County Historical Society writes that settlers in the 1850s found the county’s climate and soil suited to fruit, and that apples soon led. Commercial cider making in the Fortuna area got underway in the early 20th century with the Winslow, Wrigling and Clendenen families. Local apple production peaked in 1920, when more than 73,000 trees were recorded. During Prohibition, fifty-gallon oak barrels of hard cider went around the county and were siphoned by garden hose into vats in speakeasy basements. As the century went on, orchard land was turned over to timber, dairy and housing. Today E. C. and May’s grandson, Clif Clendenen, makes the cider with his son Drew, who is the fourth generation on the farm. “There was never pressure from my parents to do this,” Drew said in 2018. “Farming seems to be a good fit.”

Donut holes and an anniversary

In 1984 Clif Clendenen and his parents marked the cider works’ 75th anniversary. They wanted to hold another celebration the following year. As the family tells it, Clif’s mother, Carol, asked, “Why don’t we call it the Apple Harvest Festival?” Drew Clendenen credits the idea to his grandmother, who lived to be 101. He said the first gathering drew 50 people or so, who were given free donut holes and cups of cider.

The first Apple Harvest Festival was held in 1985 as a celebration of fall and farming. Fortuna merchants joined in, and it grew into a town-wide event. The Fortuna Chamber of Commerce lists Table Bluff Farms’ pumpkin patch and the Redwood Village Shopping Center among its venues in some years. The festival is still planned by a loose committee over two or three months, and much of the work is done by volunteers. “This is a town wide event fueled by scores of volunteers who donate their time and energy to make it a town wide success,” Clif Clendenen said in 2018.

Gray skies, a canceled year, and wind

The 34th festival, in 2018, was held under what the Times-Standard called a patchy gray sky. At the cider works, seven-year-old Anara Broadbent of Fortuna tasted the different apple varieties, and Liam Kirchman, also seven, ate a caramel-coated apple. The burgers on the grill were made from local beef, and the buns had local wheat in them. Drew said the dressings were local too. “There aren’t a lot of places in the world that have that,” he said. Analia Martinez, at her first festival, took the orchard tour with her son. “It was very informative, I learned the story of the apple orchard and it was fun for my son,” she said.

In September 2021 the committee announced that there would be no festival that year. “We had hoped that we could pull off a limited and safe event, but do not feel that is possible,” read the notice, signed by Clif and Drew Clendenen. The festival came back in 2022 as the 37th. Visitors that year could taste Mutsu, Jonagold and Idared apples at the orchard. Downtown, Providence-St. Joseph Health showed its inflatable colon, and the Fortuna Volunteer Fire Department staged an “escape the burning building” demonstration at its open house.

On one festival Sunday, according to the cider works, the Timber Heritage Association ran railroad speeder car rides from Clendenen’s to 8th Street and back. In 2025 the speeder cars ran at Rohner Park. That year, the 40th, the day ended with the first Fortuna Fall Festival in the park, with the Irie Rockerz playing until 8 p.m. Afterward the organizers thanked the vendors and entertainers who “came out and endured the wind!”