Graton Day Festival

At 9155 Graton Road, beside the Underwood Bar and Bistro, a .59-acre lot that was once a gas station is now the Graton Town Square. One Saturday afternoon each year it holds Graton Day. The 2026 festival ran on Saturday, September 26, from 1 to 5 p.m., and entry was free. The Graton Community Services District, which owns the square, presented it with the ReVillage Foundation, the nonprofit that leads programming there. All proceeds went to building out the square.

Froggy at one o’clock

The day opened with a book. At 1 p.m. Jonathan London, a children’s author and longtime Graton resident, read “Froggy Gets Dressed,” and the first 20 families to arrive took home a signed copy. Then the music started: Graton Grass, a local band, played first, and 3 Acre Holler followed. ALMAS (Alianza de Mujeres Activas y Solidarias, the Women’s Action and Solidarity Alliance) served food, meals, and drinks. ALMAS is the domestic worker organizing project of Centro Laboral de Graton. Dewey Watson, previewing the day in the Sebastopol Times, also promised farmers and local beer and wine.

The contests are the oldest part of the program. In the zucchini races, children and adults build and decorate their own racers for a downhill run on a dedicated track. The pie contest judges entries on appearance and taste in four categories: Apple, Other Fruit, Non-Fruit/Savory, and Youth Under 18. Every pie must be homemade. After judging, the pies are sold to the public, and the money goes to the town square fund. The festival listing described the chicken bingo as “chickens, meet bingo.” There was also a watermelon-eating contest.

For children there was a Ceilume tile scavenger hunt in its second year, glitter temporary tattoos and a kiddo slackline from Toy Works, and pinwheel crafts. ReVillage Green Valley’s own announcement promised “kids running wild or sitting still for storytime.” On the square sits the Museum of the Future, a shipping container that ReVillage calls a living community archive, “part art installation, part storytelling hub.” The Graton Community Club, which Watson called a 112-year-old institution, kept a table to promote its Fall Flower Show and Plant Sale of October 16–17, 2026.

A livery stable, a lunch counter, a vacant lot

Graton sits in the old Green Valley, between Sebastopol to the south, Occidental to the west, Forestville to the north, and Santa Rosa to the east. The Graton Community Services District says the Pomo and Miwok were its first inhabitants. The town was founded in 1905. The Press Democrat put its population at about 1,800 in 2024.

According to Ron Welsh of Sonoma County Properties, the Graton Road lot was first the site of Neep’s Livery Stable. It later became a gas station and lunch counter. Myrtle and Earl Baker bought the property in 1942, and many locals still know it as Baker’s Lunch. The original building, one of the last from the town’s founding, was torn down in 2021. The lot went up for sale in July 2023. The services district acquired it on February 1, 2024, and the Sebastopol Times reported a sale price of $860,000. The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors gave $30,000 in tourism impact funds and $253,600 in Fifth District infrastructure funds toward the purchase.

That spring, nearly 10 percent of the town’s residents went to public meetings or filled out a survey about the square. They asked for a stage, market stalls, shade trees, and grass. Matt Jorgensen, the project’s coordinator, said the district planned to weave “local culture, ecology and history into the built environment of the square.” John Nagle, who had lived in Graton 30 years, told the Press Democrat he looked forward to the return of Graton Day and expected the plaza to become the “heart of Graton.”

A parade to closed-off streets

The festival is older than the square. The Graton historian Lesa Tanner, in her book “Graton,” dates Graton Day to 1993 and says it was held every September until the mid-2010s. In Watson’s summary of her account, it began with a parade that led people to closed-off streets for an afternoon of kids’ activities, local food, music, T-shirts, pie contests, firetruck displays, and the Hub Bub Club Band.

In 2016 the Ag + Open Space District approved an application from the Graton Green Group, the group behind the town’s park. The approval created a fundraiser that used Graton Day elements to pay for park improvements. Plans for an annual revival were in place when COVID-19 halted them. Liz Junge, who had helped with Graton Day in its early years, joined the Graton Green Group board that same year. She effectively ran the group through the pandemic and became its president in 2022.

October 12, 2024

The Sebastopol Times called the 2024 return the first Graton Day Festival in eight years. Lindsay Parker chaired the event team, with Ty Brown as vice chair, district board member Jennifer Butler, and Jorgensen. The festival ran from 2 to 6 p.m. on October 12, the same day the Graton Community Club held its Fall Flower Show.

Graton Grass played at 2. The winning pies were announced at 2:30. At 3 a children’s parade set off, led by the Hubbub Club, as the Times spelled it. Afterward Jorgensen, Supervisor Lynda Hopkins, and others spoke from the stage about the square’s development, and there was a land acknowledgement and a blessing from the local Zen Center. At 4 the headliner, Josh Brough and the Contraband, an offshoot of Poor Man’s Whiskey, took the stage. The Times advised, “Wear shoes you can dance in.” Vendors sold Mexican, Greek, and Japanese food, along with burgers and brats.

Visitors were invited to spread wildflower seed on the lot and plant native plants donated by the Hallberg Butterfly Garden. The Museum of the Future made its first appearance that day. Jorgensen described it as “a history of Graton and looking seven generations past and seven generations forward.” Local archivists brought old photographs to it, and visitors were asked to add to a community time capsule. Jorgensen explained the timing this way: “There’s a real revival with younger people moving into town with fresh energy and a lot of energy galvanized around the town square.”

Paying for the square

The district finished paying off the property at the end of 2025, which secured it permanently as public space. Building the square out is slower work. The district is a sewer agency, and by law it cannot use sewer funds for the Town Square. Board vice president Joseph McIntyre put the remaining cost at about $1 million and said the pay-as-you-go approach means “the pace of the project is slower than I think lots of folks would prefer.” Under contract, ReVillage, run by Jorgensen and Tori Immel, carries much of the work.

“We need the thing working,” McIntyre said in September 2026. “We need to be able to open it up and make it a public space to see what is really possible.” In the spring, the district had written that it hoped to secure permits by September and take the fences down for public access as early as the fall of 2026.