Grandview Days

At 6:30 on a Thursday evening in August, residents of Grandview line 2nd Street to watch the Grandview Community Parade come through downtown. The Grandview Chamber of Commerce organizes it. The entries are floats, bands and vehicles carrying community groups, organizations, royalty, school groups and local businesses. Announcers read a short description of each entry as it passes, and the Chamber asks entrants to keep that description brief so it can be read “while you are passing by without having to stop.” In 2026 the parade was opened the day before, Wednesday, August 5, with a flag-raising ceremony at noon, and the Honor Guard gave the flag salute that started the Fair & Rodeo.

The 2026 line of march included the Grandview High School Cheer Squad, GHS DECA, Grandview School District Transportation, Miss Grandview, Grandview Cheer, the Grandview Museum, Scout Troop 3207, the Yakima Valley Fair Foundation, the Walmart Distribution Center, The J.M. Smucker Co. and the Yakima Valley Dairy Ambassador. The Lower Valley Honor Guard and Team Midnight also marched. Queens and courts came from the West Valley Fair, Sunnyside, Wapato, Granger, Prosser, Selah Community Days and the Broken Spur Rodeo. Anytime Fitness, Chino Valley Truck Wash and DW’s Motor Machine entered for local business.

Smoke and a burning float, 2026

Until the morning of the 2026 parade, no one was sure it would go on. Wildfires burning throughout the region had raised concerns about air quality. The day before, the Chamber posted that “the chamber board takes very seriously the well-being of our community and is very concerned with the air quality at the time of the parade.” The board waited until 9 a.m. Thursday to decide, to give conditions a chance to improve. The parade went on as planned.

Before the start, Zillah’s royalty float caught fire. The Zillah party found a replacement float and had it set up before the parade began. That put the judging behind schedule, but Zillah still competed. Judges score royalty floats on performance, attitude, decoration, and introduction and conversation. The 2026 judges were Audriana Campos, Haven Niemeyer, Molly Schutt of Prosser Memorial Health and Gretchen Chronis of the City of Grandview. Zillah won the Sweepstakes award. Sunnyside took Mayor’s Choice, Prosser placed second and Wapato third.

The fair at the end of the route

The parade belongs to the Yakima Valley Fair and Rodeo, a four-day fair held at the fairgrounds at 812 Wallace Way. In 2019 the parade started at Grandview Middle School on West Second Street. Afterward parade-goers were invited out to the fairgrounds, where admission was half price. There they could see the FFA and 4-H animals, exhibits and booths, and the carnival midway.

The 2019 fair, which ran August 7 through 10, shows how the week is built around the parade. Wednesday brought livestock classification, dairy showmanship, a championship drive for all species, a Little Wrangler Rodeo and a movie at the amphitheater at dusk. Thursday’s showmanship classes and 4-H and FFA round robin led into the parade at 6:30, then ranch sorting in the rodeo arena and a family night of praise. Friday opened with the livestock market sale and ended with a diaper derby and the Pro West Rodeo. Saturday held the Chamber car show, a tractor driving contest, pee wee sheep and swine showmanship, trophies, a second rodeo, and then mud football and volleyball for the youth exhibitors before the fair closed at midnight.

The 2019 grand marshal was Gary Christensen, founder of Christensen Inc., which he runs with his sons. The Chamber had named him Volunteer of the Year at its April banquet for his work with Rotary, the Chamber, Community Day of Service, the swimming pool and other projects. He rode in his 1955 Candy Apple Red Chev Bel Air convertible with his wife, Annette, and three of their fourteen grandchildren. “That honor was quite a surprise,” he told the Sunnyside Sun. “I’m very excited about being in the parade. It’s going to be fun.”

Canvas booths on Division Street

The fair dates to 1927. Don Fortune’s History of Festival-Fair, a Community Success Story sets the year this way: Cal Coolidge was president, Roland Hartley was governor and C.A. (Charley) Miller was mayor of Grandview. Fortune writes that the year “saw the coming out of Henry Ford’s sensational new Model ‘A’ and of Grandview’s very first harvest Festival,” which ran two days, September 7 and 8. Quoting “The History of Grandview,” he lists needlework, advertising booths and local midway attractions. Miss Esther Bohlke was chosen Queen of the Harvest Festival. The best exhibits went on to the Yakima State Fair and won a number of premiums there.

Until 1948 the canvas-covered booths stood solid down Division Street between Main and Second Streets, and vacant buildings were pressed into use for exhibits. Because the festival was held as late as the “Ides of September,” Fortune notes, there was more fruit and farm produce to show.

The Team Pull was a founding feature. Howard Jackson organized it and directed it through 1986. He described the first pull to Fortune: “We obtained 4,000 pounds of sand for that first pull, and we had to pinch-hit by adding a number of 150 pound men when the teams continued past the two tons of sand. The contest was finally won by Frank Lyall at 5,500 to 6,000 pounds.” Jackson called the scores through a Rudy Vallee-type megaphone, “but didn’t croon any,” Fortune remembered. That first pull was held where John Sullivan’s TV Emporium later stood, the site of Northwest Wine Country Real Estate in 2017. Later pulls moved to whatever vacant lot the business district offered. Otto Ragsdale won the pull at the second festival, where Miss Audry Blechschmidt was queen.

Bagpipes, steers and a six-legged horse

The fourth fair, in 1931, featured a baby clinic, a diaper-changing contest for men, pie baking and food demonstrations. The sources disagree on the polio year. Fortune and the timeline that follows his history say no festival was held in 1934 because of a severe polio epidemic in the valley. The fair’s own history gives 1931 as the year it was canceled for polio. In those years the Bagpiper’s Band from Vancouver, B.C., in Fortune’s words, “marched and skirled and wailed and flaunted their ‘mini-kilts’” in the festival parade. Governor Clarence Martin attended in 1939 and Governor Arthur Langlie spoke in 1941.

The war canceled the fair in 1943 and 1944. In 1945 Byron Vance and Col. Evan Jenkins added a combined 4-H and FFA Fat Stock Sale. Thirty-three head of steers, hogs and lambs brought $2,640. The Grand Champion Steer sold for 30 cents a pound, and the top hog went to Grandview Packing Company. Bob Hamilton ran the last festival on Division Street in 1947 and was rained out. He told Fortune that the work kept him from his own farm: “I set my water on every other row of corn at home and couldn’t get loose to change it for a week. People told me that it would be ruined, but the ears got so big that the picker couldn’t handle them.”

In 1948 stock sheds and a concrete-floored display building went up in the city-owned park, on Second Street land that is now the Grandview campus of Yakima Valley College. A “golden” Packard was given away that year. The 1950 Truck Rodeo had drivers backing and jockeying trucks and semis around a fixed course, which Fortune likened to pole bending “only with a six legged horse.” As more 4-H and FFA youth took part, the Harvest Festival became the Yakima Valley Junior Fair in 1951. A 125-head cattle building went up in 1955 for $5,000 in materials, with the labor donated. Grandview celebrated its Golden Anniversary at the 1956 fair.

On its entertainment the record splits again. The fair’s timeline says Barbara Mandrell sang two nights to sold-out crowds in 1960, brought by fair board president Dr. Jim Long. The Yakima Herald-Republic and the fair’s own history place her performances in the 1970s.

Cedar planks on Wallace Way

The fair left downtown to make room for the college campus. The Herald-Republic and the fair’s history date the move to the Country Park grounds on Wallace Way to 1988. Ray Vining, fair president from 1987 to 1990, wrote that preparation began in 1987 with irrigation, grass and phone lines, and that he leased the whole future site so the option would not lapse. In his account the board sold what assets it could after the 1988 fair, and the 1989 gates opened on a new livestock office, scales, and dairy, beef and sheep barns.

Vining and Cliff Vining took down the cyclone fence at the old grounds and, with volunteers, raised it again at the new site. They also pulled the corrals from the former Grandview Packing Company to build the new riding arena. According to Mayor Carl Stevens, those 3-by-12 cedar planks had been used to build the original Yellowstone road through Grandview. The steel Butler building known as the Beef Barn was the only building moved. It is the 1955 cattle building, now called the Dybdahl Building. Keith Jones paid for the first exhibit building in honor of his wife, Peggy, and then helped put it up. “The Fair Board re-built a bigger and better facility and did it with funds donated by community members,” Vining said.

In 2001 the fair took its present name and added a rodeo. Its first three years were on the ProWest circuit, and it then joined the PRCA for several years. A wild cow milking contest was added in memory of Vernon Bos. The fair marked 90 years in 2017 and was canceled in 2020 because of the Covid pandemic. In 2016 Mathew Humphries built a display honoring Howard Jackson as his Eagle Scout project, and fireworks were added to Saturday night after the rodeo.