Founders' Day

Labor Day on the City Square

The first runners leave from the east side of the Wellsville Tabernacle at seven on Labor Day morning. The 10K goes at 7:00 sharp and the 5K ten minutes behind it, with a one-mile Kids K for the youngest. Cache Valley Daily calls the race the unofficial kickoff of Founders’ Day and says it has brought the community together for 50 years. Some 500 runners generally turn out.

While they run, the pancake breakfast is under way at the City Square Pavilion, from 7:30 to 9:30. Along with the pancakes come farm fresh eggs, sausage, hash browns, juice, hot chocolate and coffee. In 2026 the proceeds went to the Mountain Crest girls’ wrestling team. The square belongs to the Tabernacle, a Gothic Revival building that Wellsville raised between 1902 and 1908 with volunteer labor and local materials. It has stood as the center of church and community activity for more than a century. Vendor booths fill the grass north of it from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. On the 2026 holiday the city closed 100 East in front of the building to parking and towed any car left there.

At nine, Wellsville Scout Troop 21 presents the flags at the corner of Center and Main. The parade starts at ten from 300 North Center. It runs south along Center to 200 South, turns down 2nd South to 1st East, and comes back to Main Street. Jeremy and Ruthanne Ellis chair the parade committee. Each summer the city newsletter asks for volunteers to carry banners and to work as pooper scoopers, which it calls “the most important job.” When the last entry passes, the Sham Battle is held at 200 South 100 East. The horseshoe tournament follows it at the pits west of the pickleball courts, for two-person teams playing for first- and second-place prizes.

The afternoon spreads across the square. The band Rough Stock plays west of the Tabernacle from noon to 3:30. North of the booths, Checketts Amusements sets up bounce houses, obstacle courses and giant slides, and a $10 wristband buys unlimited rides. Jennifer Larsen leads free bingo, with prizes, starting at 1:00 at the City Office. Raffle tickets sell for a dollar by the booths for a quilt, its quilting donated by Paula Murray. At six the Mt. Sterling Stampede, free to watch, starts at the Wellsville Arena at 300 South 350 West. Cache Valley Daily calls it the event that closes out Founders’ Day.

The week before

The Monday is the end of a week. The 2026 schedule carried the line “170 Years of Timeless Traditions,” and it began on Tuesday, September 1, at the City Office at 75 East Main. There the Wellsville City Historical Committee presented its special speaker, Eli Lucero. Cache Valley Daily describes him as a long-time Wellsville resident who has spent 25 years as a Herald Journal photojournalist and has twice been named Photographer of the Year for Utah and Idaho. The committee’s August announcement read: “You’ve seen his photos in the paper and online; now hear from the man behind the camera.”

On Thursday evening visitors met at the cemetery entrance, 400 North 200 East, with a chair and a water bottle for the annual Cemetery Stories. Volunteers tell about townspeople long dead and about odd corners of Wellsville’s past. The city’s flyer quotes someone who called the tour “one of the best parts of the Founders’ Day celebration.” In 2026 the speakers among the graves were Kent Larsen, Linda Wursten, Michelle Lyle and Christine Lindley. The committee reported a large turnout at both evenings. Earl Rouse recorded the talk and the tour for the committee’s YouTube page.

Pickleball doubles were played Thursday and Friday at the courts south of the Tabernacle. On Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30 the Wellsville Stampede Semi-Pro Rodeo ran at the arena. The 2026 edition was its 14th as a Rocky Mountain Professional Rodeo Association event. Winners of the cow hide race take home belt buckles. The opening flag ceremony is ridden by women and girls ten and older, each in a white shirt and cowboy hat, on her own horse, carrying her own American flag.

Saturday evening moved out to the Wellsville Dam. Food trucks and music started at 7:00, the movie Jumanji at about 8:00, and fireworks at 10:00. The schedule told people to bring lawn chairs and bug spray. Local businesses and citizens pay for the fireworks with donations. Before the show in 2026, the town’s Fire and EMS crews let visitors touch the trucks, look over the Life Flight helicopter, and try on firefighting gear. On Sunday at 7:30 the patriotic program met at the Wellsville LDS Stake Center at 30 South Center, with Sunday dress requested. A city choir of community singers, young and old, rehearsed for it on Sunday evenings through the summer. The town’s history notes that each ward also keeps a choir that sings for Founders’ Day.

Maughan’s Fort, 1856

The day being celebrated is 15 September 1856. That day seven households entered Cache Valley: the families of Peter, John and William H. Maughan, Zial Riggs and Francis W. Gunnell, and two single men, George W. Bryan and O.D. Thompson. There were 25 of them, the oldest 45 years old and the youngest six weeks. They drove to a stream and camped, and they called the place Maughan’s Fort. The wagon boxes were lifted off the running gear, and the women made homes in them while the men explored and cut meadow hay for the stock.

Eleven days after they arrived, snow covered the ground ankle-deep. During that storm Mary Ann Weston Maughan gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, the first white child born to permanent settlers in Cache Valley. Within a few years the settlement had a grist mill, saw mill, brickyard, tannery and ice house. On 13 November 1859 the apostles Orson Hyde and Ezra T. Benson made William H. Maughan bishop, an office he held for more than forty years. They also renamed the fort Wellsville, for Daniel H. Wells, second counselor to Brigham Young. Peter Maughan, first probate judge of Cache County, fixed the county seat at the fort, where it stayed until 5 March 1860. James H. Martineau surveyed the town in 1863 on the compass points, in ten-acre blocks. It was incorporated on 19 January 1866, with William H. Maughan as mayor. The city calls it Cache County’s oldest permanent settlement.

In 1986 the Wellsville Historic Preservation Commission added a bus tour of the town as it stood in 1863. Members pointed out the sites to citizens and visitors from a brochure built on the plot map of 28 October 1863, when Wellsville was seven years old.

The Sham Battle

Scott Wells, the city manager, traced the Sham Battle to the first years in the valley. As he described it to the Herald Journal in 2017, the militia trained in self-defense against Indian attack, and the training ended in a mock battle. “Pioneers would dress up and act like attacking Indians so that the militia could practice their skills,” he said. Wells said the city has recreated the battle since 1930. The Salt Lake Tribune put the start at 1931 at the latest.

For most of those years the battle looked the way the Herald Journal described it in 2017. White residents in red and black face paint and headdresses whooped and hollered on horseback as they fought costumed pioneer settlers. A recorded narrator spoke over patriotic orchestral music while the riders circled covered wagons on bareback horses, and the two sides pulled each other down and wrestled on the ground. The narration told of a three-year-old girl who disappeared and was never found. It spoke of Colonel Connor bringing troops to “the Battle of the Bear River,” in a tone the Tribune columnist Robert Gehrke called triumphant. It did not mention the estimated 250 Shoshone, at least 90 of them women and children, whom historians count among the dead of what is now called the Bear River Massacre. The Tribune adds that the Shoshone perpetrated no violent skirmishes on the settlers.

The objections were not new. According to a 2001 Herald Journal article, the Wellsville LDS stake president banned any mention of the battle in Founders’ Day notices in ward bulletins. In 2016 Darren Parry of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation spoke at Founders’ Day about Indian history in northern Utah. He said none of his grandmother’s stories had appeared in his school history books. Then in September 2017 Gehrke published a column and video, and the battle drew wide attention. The Tribune reported that thousands had watched that year’s performance on September 4. Robert Lucero, founder of the Ute Indian Tribe Political Action Committee, called it “an absolutely backward, ignorant and historically inaccurate, offensive portrayal of pioneer and Indian relations.” Mayor Thomas Bailey answered: “It’s just a tradition that’s carried on. And that’s the only purpose for it. It’s just something that young people in Wellsville have enjoyed doing.” He apologized to anyone offended. He pointed out that the city had placed a marker that Memorial Day at the burial place of enslaved Black people brought to Wellsville with the early settlers. Days before the battle, the historian Ronald Coleman had spoken in town on the history of slavery in Utah.

Parry, by then the band’s chairman, addressed the city council on September 20. Councilman Carl Leatham told him that he had ridden in the battle for 18 years, that he had thought it an honor to portray Native Americans, and that he meant no disrespect. At a council meeting some residents said they did not plan to stop. One woman told Parry his name “wasn’t Indian enough.” In October 2017 a small committee agreed informally that white residents would no longer paint themselves red and play American Indians. The battle would go on in some new form, perhaps bandits or federal troops on horseback. Dustin Coleman sat on the committee. He had played an Indian as a teenager and now led the pioneer cavalry, and he said the recorded narration would be revised to be more historically accurate. “That’s all I wanted,” Parry said. “I’m certainly not one to kill their celebration. I don’t want to do that. We don’t want to erase history, but there’s some aspects of it that aren’t as tidy and neat as others, and we shouldn’t celebrate it.” He said his people planned to set up tepees at future Founders’ Days, with food, song and dance from their own traditions. The committee had also asked him to ride in on horseback wearing a headdress. “That’s probably not going to happen,” he said.

The 2026 schedule lists the Sham Battle in one line, after the parade, at 200 South 100 East.