Genoa Candy Dance

The candy comes out of copper kettles in the Genoa Volunteer Firehouse kitchen and goes on sale in the Town Hall. There are three kinds of fudge, which candy chairman Dee Dykes listed in 2019: “plain, walnut chocolate, and peanut butter.” The volunteers also make divinity, peanut brittle, English toffee, dark-chocolate peanut clusters, almond bark and cookies-and-cream bark. “We usually do a limited number of chocolate-dipped pretzels decorated with sparkles,” Dykes said. All of it is handmade without preservatives, and it sells out quickly. The best seller is a mixed package of fudge and divinity. In 2019 prices ran from $5 for pretzels to $17 for a mixed box.

This is the Genoa Candy Dance, held on the last full weekend of September in Nevada’s oldest settlement, a town of about 900 people at the foot of the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada in Douglas County. The 2026 Candy Dance, held September 26 and 27, was the 107th. The town expected 30,000 people over the two days. Nevada Magazine put the usual crowd at between 30,000 and 50,000. A week before the 2026 weekend, the Town of Genoa posted: “It’s Sunday morning in Genoa, and it’s quiet enough to walk your dog across the street in front of the bar.”

Booths from Mormon Station to Main Street

The Arts and Crafts Faire fills the grounds of Mormon Station State Historic Park and spills along Nixon Street and the sides of Genoa Lane and Main Street. More than 400 vendors take part, selling arts and crafts, activities and food. It runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday and from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday, and visitors get in free.

Nevada Magazine’s 2019 inventory of the stalls listed handmade pottery, jewelry, clothing, leather goods, country crafts “and lots of tie-dye.” It also found Western hats, soaps, lotions, candles, scarves, handbags, decorated mirrors, blown glass, paintings, photography, and wood and metal yard art. Food vendors sold barbecue, Indian tacos, kettle corn, ice cream, margaritas, sodas, root beer and deep-fried delicacies. The fire department’s six volunteer firefighters and their supporters ran a booth with two bars and sold Italian sausage sandwiches.

Booth numbers on the town’s printed map do not always run in order, “due to terrain and natural obstacles.” An information booth near the corner of Genoa Lane, Nixon Street and Main Street helps people find their way. The town asks visitors to bring cash because ATM lines run long. It also asks them to leave dogs at home, since the state park allows no pets during large events.

The roads into town close from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on both days. Cars park at three lots for $10 each:

• Genoa Lane: the largest lot. Traffic on US Highway 395 usually backs up 15 to 20 minutes at the turn.
• Foothill Road: south of town.
• Genoa Cemetery on Jacks Valley Road: north of town. It is the smallest lot and is usually full by 9:30 Saturday morning.

Free shuttles run from the lots into town.

Saturday night in the Town Park

The faire is the newer part. The older part is the Saturday night dinner and dance, which has been held since 1919. Billie J. Rightmire, the town historian, wrote that the live band plays “everything from rock-n-roll, country-western, swing and hop to waltzes for all ages.”

The 2026 dinner dance ran from 4:30 to 9 p.m. in the Genoa Town Park. Carson City BBQ served smoked chicken and pulled pork, Grandpa Archie’s Ice Cream served sundaes, and CV Flyte poured at two full bars. Jakota Wass and his band played from 6:30. Dinner Dance Committee volunteers chose four signature cocktails: the Chocolate Two-Step, the Genoa-rita, the Candy Dance Cosmo and the Candy Apple Mule. Tickets were $67.50, and the dance sold out. A late shuttle carried dancers to and from the Genoa Lane lot until 10 p.m.

Street lights for two hundred people

In 1919, Genoa wanted street lights. Lillian Virgin Finnegan, daughter of Judge Daniel Webster Virgin, suggested a dance. She also proposed making candy to pass around during the evening to encourage a good “turn-out” of couples. Finnegan was an early graduate of Nevada State university and worked as a teacher, suffragist and businesswoman.

It is said the idea came from a dance Finnegan attended on a cruise, where waiters passed trays of candy. Nevada Magazine added that “no one seems to know where the cruise was, or if in fact it was held on an ocean-going vessel or a riverboat.”

Finnegan organized the dance with her aunt, Jane Raycraft Campbell, and the women of the town, about 200 people in all. The dance was held in the building now called the Genoa Town Hall, then known as the Raycraft Hall. Young ladies carried trays of free homemade candy. Afterward came a midnight supper, which Rightmire and Nevada Magazine place at the Raycraft Hotel. The Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority places it at the Raycraft Hall instead and says the women made cakes as well as candy. Rightmire wrote that the supper was “as always, a culinary delight.” She judged that if the candy did not bring people out, the supper surely would.

The dance raised the money and the lights went up. Then the monthly electric bills arrived, so the candy makers were called back every year to pay for a year’s worth of electricity. The dance became “the Big Event of the Season,” drawing couples from Reno, Carson City, Minden and Gardnerville. It continued through the Great Depression and the Second World War, when, in Nevada Magazine’s words, sugar and gas rationing “merely put a small dent in the fun.”

Rightmire, a fourth-generation Genoan, made candy at home as a girl. In the 1940s she dug potatoes on the Trimmer Ranch to earn money for dance clothes. “I would wear out the Sears catalog looking for a new skirt or a new top,” she told Nevada Magazine at 86. About a decade later, wearing a catalog outfit, she met Don, her future husband, at the dance.

Twelve vendors on a Genoa Lane lawn

The town dates the Arts and Crafts Faire to 1974, while Rightmire writes only that it was added in the 1970s. It began with twelve vendors on the front lawn of a private house in Sierra Shadows on Genoa Lane. A few years later it moved to the Mormon Station grounds, and it later grew to two days and spread into the downtown streets. With the faire, the Candy Dance began to make money.

The proceeds pay the street-light bill, plow snow off the streets and keep the town tidy. According to Rightmire, they make up a substantial portion of Genoa’s annual budget.

The candy changed hands in those years too. Rancher Lisa Lekumberry remembers her grandmother “and all the older ladies with trays passing candy around the dance,” and a bunny hop in the town hall. By the 1980s, when Lekumberry was candy co-chairman, women no longer made candy in their own kitchens. Groups now worked together in the firehouse kitchen. Lekumberry and her co-chairman, Thelma Schenk, persuaded the town to buy two copper kettles for fudge. By the 2019 centennial the volunteers had four, and they produced 3,200 pounds of candy that year.

A bronze statue under an old lamp

The 2019 centennial honored Finnegan, who died in 1938 and is buried in the Genoa Cemetery. It also honored the hundreds of volunteers who had kept the lights on. The town unveiled a 7-foot bronze statue of Finnegan and a carved bas-relief representing the volunteers, lit by a restored original streetlight.

That year the town’s paid staff numbered two. Alison and Roger Grey, who oversaw the volunteers, recruited vendor hosts to help artisans put up their booths. “Honestly, we couldn’t do this without them,” Alison Grey said. “The candy making alone, that’s huge.” Town manager JT Chevallier agreed: “It’s only achievable because of our volunteers.”

Rightmire’s history ends in the same spirit: “We will be celebrating the ‘Candy Dance’ as long as we have volunteers to keep it going.”