Golden Onion Days

The schoolhouse on the hill

Golden Onion Days opens on a Thursday evening beside the Peteetneet, the yellow brick schoolhouse with red sandstone trim on the hill at the east end of Utah Avenue. The 2026 celebration began there at 6 p.m. on September 3 with a free concert by Aaron Watson in the Peteetneet Amphitheater, presented by Payson City in partnership with Mountain View Hospital. The run ended five days later, on Labor Day Monday, September 7.

On the Sunday and Monday the old school holds the Flower and Art Show. A city post during the 2026 celebration called it the longest-running event of Golden Onion Days, then in its 74th year, and invited visitors to see flowers, artwork and photography, and to “see who grew the biggest onion.” Alice Heslop has led the show for about 23 years. Gardeners bring entries to the auditorium between 7 and 11 on Sunday morning. The doors close for judging, and the public comes in at 2.

Single roses, marigolds, gladiolus, dahlias, zinnias and asters stand in vases the committee provides, shown as one bloom or as three of a kind. There are miniature arrangements under five inches, a class for arrangements on the onion theme, and a 2026 theme class, “Celebrating America, the Hometown Way.” Children enter a junior division that allows fruits and vegetables. Every flower must be grown and arranged by the person who enters it. Exhibitors come only from Payson and its neighbors: Salem, Santaquin, Goshen, Genola, Elk Ridge, Springlake, West Mountain and Benjamin.

The art show hangs alongside the flowers, sorted by age. Classes run from an Elementary Youth class for artists eight and under up through adult amateurs. Photography has its own classes, and a professional exhibit is the one section open to artists from outside the Payson area. The rules define painting as anything done with a brush, and drawing as graphite, colored pencil, pastel, pen and ink, scratchboard or chalk.

Memorial Park and Main Street

Down the hill, the City of Fun carnival sets up rides and midway games in Memorial Park, and food and merchandise vendors fill the same lawn. Fireworks go up over the park on one night of the run, and families spread out across the park and the blocks around it. Admission to the celebration is free. Provo.com advises bringing cash for the food booths and the rides.

The rest of the program is spread across town. There is a baby contest, a kids fair, and a car show of classic cars at Park View Elementary from 10 to 4 on Labor Day. Provo.com describes the Onion Days 5K and 10K as starting at 7 a.m. sharp on Labor Day morning from the Payson City Center on West Utah Avenue. The same guide describes a Treasure Adventure, a city-wide trail of riddles with a $3,000 prize for the first person to solve it. City posts during the 2026 run mentioned:

• fire trucks and firefighting equipment for children on the Saturday
• a Western Dance
• a concert by Runaway Fire
• Payson Community Theater’s Frozen: The Broadway Musical
• a large crowd for the Payson Band on Sunday evening

Moving Utah notes that a demolition derby appears in the celebration’s past but comes and goes from the lineup.

The Grand Parade rolls down historic Main Street. A Daily Herald photograph from Labor Day, September 7, 2015, shows Gunnerson Dental’s dinosaur-themed float on the route. Provo.com lists local bands, floats, community groups, horses, and candy thrown to children, and says chairs go out along the route early. According to the guide, the crowd knows many of the marchers and shouts their names as they pass. It also reports that the baby contest has run long enough that people now enter the children of people who were once entered themselves.

Mayor Stewart’s homecoming

In 1929 Mayor L.D. Stewart proclaimed Payson’s first Onion Harvest and Homecoming. Provo.com, reading the proclamation, says former residents had asked to come back to Payson, bring friends, and see old neighbors. The harvest was finishing, and the town made a weekend of it. Payson was then an onion-growing district, and the celebration took the crop’s name.

Provo.com traces the custom to the 1920s. It says state officials then encouraged Utah towns to build their celebrations around a local product, which is how the state came to have Steel Days in American Fork, Strawberry Days in Pleasant Grove, and Peach Days in Brigham City. At some later point the event became Payson City Golden Onion Days. Moving Utah finds no firm year for the change.

Provo.com calls Golden Onion Days almost certainly the oldest continuous community celebration in the valley. Moving Utah notes that it is sometimes billed as Utah’s oldest continuous Labor Day celebration and calls that claim a stretch. Provo.com also tells visitors not to drive down expecting an onion market, since the valley’s south end has taken decades of residential growth.

The Peteetneet holds an older story. Payson began on October 20, 1850, when three wagons arrived, led by James Pace with Andrew Jackson Stewart and John Courtland Searles. The settlement was first named Peteetneet, for a Ute leader who lived in the area. In the latter part of 1851 Brigham Young renamed it to honor Pace.

In 1897 the city signed over its gravel bed on the east side of town for a new school, despite objections that the site was too far from the center. Richard C. Watkins, a Utah County architect, designed a Victorian building. The lumber came from John E. Spencer’s sawmill in Payson Canyon and the red sandstone from Spanish Fork Canyon, and the building cost $22,000. A resident, Charlie Long, provided in his will for a bell, but the belfry never got one. The city gives 1901 as the year of dedication, while the museum’s own history says students first arrived in January 1902.

The school closed in 1988. When the city proposed demolishing it, Larry Brown and Dr. Gordon Taylor led a citizens’ group, People Preserving Peteetneet, which restored it as a museum and arts center.

A queen in a golden onion

The 1936 celebration is told in detail in an account by Utah State History, reprinted in the Payson Chronicle. That July, Payson sent its Onion Days queen, Cecil Gale, to Salt Lake City with a parade float for the Legion Parade. The opening on August 31 drew more than ten thousand people. Spectators braved rain, and an estimated 3,000 watched the horse racing. The parades ran to more than 100 floats from around the state, joined by the Payson high school marching band, the Payson American Legion auxiliary chorus, and the Payson unit of the National Guard. On the main float, Cecil Gale stood in the middle of a large golden onion.

She had been one of eleven candidates for queen. Their names went into a hat, two were drawn, and the voting took place between those two. She was born in Payson on February 19, 1913, the eighth of nine children of a farmer, Charles Gale, and Phoebe Lorraine Hancock. The 1940 census found her living in her father’s house and working as a beauty operator. In December 1942 she enlisted in the WAVES, the Women’s Naval Reserve. She married Joseph Raymond Coulter in Nevada in 1951 and lived with him in New York City until his death in 1962, then returned to Utah. She died in Salt Lake City on February 12, 1984, and is buried in Payson near her parents.