Handcart Days

City Park on a Friday evening

The games at Bountiful City Park, at 400 North and 200 West, open at five o’clock on the Friday of Handcart Days. For the 2026 celebration that Friday was July 24. Many of the games are free: gunny sack races, nine-square, corn hole, a ladder rope toss, ginormous bubbles, and a drone that drops candy on the children below. Mountain men keep a display with activities, and there is a Native American display. Tickets for the rest are sold at the park, cash or card. They pay for the mechanical bull, the 24-foot climbing wall, a laser tag arena, battle-zone jousting, a trackless train, a fish pond, face painting, balloon animals, and gold mining.

The food comes from the celebration’s own booths, because Handcart Days accepts no outside vendors. The menu runs to barbecue sandwiches, corn on the cob, hot dogs, nachos, scones, snow cones, popcorn, Creamies, Fat Boy ice cream, and Cutler’s cookies. “We keep prices as low as possible to encourage families to participate whatever the economic times,” the organizers write, adding that “the park activities give children an idea how pioneer families lived.” The concessions stay open until 9:30.

At eight o’clock people spread blankets and set up camp chairs in front of the park pavilion for a free concert. In 2026 Jenny Oaks Baker & Family Four played. On Main Street, chairs could go down along the parade route from nine o’clock that night. Any chair left there earlier without someone sitting in it was collected by the police and held at the station for its owner.

Main Street at nine in the morning

Saturday begins early with the Handcart Days Race, which the South Davis Recreation Center sponsors separately from the celebration. The parade steps off at 9 a.m. It runs north on Bountiful’s Main Street from 1500 South to 400 North, then turns west and continues to 100 West. The organizers describe it as one of the largest parades in Utah, 1.8 miles long, put on by hundreds of volunteers and watched by tens of thousands. Their home page calls it the second largest in the state. The 2026 theme was Faith & Freedom, and the grand marshal was Greg Putz. “Parade is on Saturday again this year!” the website announced. In other years it has marched on Friday evening.

From ten to three the park games run again. At 10 p.m. Bountiful City sends up its fireworks from behind the east side of Mueller Park Junior High School, at 955 East 1800 South. The show can be watched from designated spaces around the building, from the surrounding neighborhoods, “and even miles away.” The organizers’ advice on where to stand: “Ask a local.”

Handcart Days has no paid staff. Its money comes from park tickets, concessions, and sponsors, and all of it goes to the celebration in the current and future years. The organization is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. People from three cities in south Davis County do the work, and the committee thanks “the thousands who march in the parade, perform in concerts, staff the food booths, and help with the games.” Curtis and Lori Poole are listed as the organization’s contacts. In 2023 the words “Celebrating the Past, Present, and Future” were added to Handcart Days. The 2027 celebration is set for July 16 and 17.

Handcarts from Iowa City

The celebration takes its name from a migration of 1856 through 1860. A history compiled for the committee counts nearly 3,000 Latter-day Saint emigrants in ten handcart companies, with about 650 handcarts among them. The committee’s About page says more than 3,000. They walked to Utah from Iowa City, 1,300 miles, or from Florence, Nebraska, 1,030 miles. Each person was generally limited to 15 to 20 pounds of belongings, and the carts also had to hold enough food and clothing for the trip. The history’s table gives the toll for the two companies of late 1856. The Willie company left Florence on August 17 with about 404 people and lost 68. The Martin company left on August 27 with 576, lost more than 145, and reached Salt Lake City on November 30. The historian LeRoy Hafen called the venture “the most remarkable travel experiment in the history of Western America.”

Bountiful was settled before any handcart arrived. According to a 2006 Church News account, Perrigrine Sessions, a member of the 1847 vanguard company, set out northward three days after reaching the Salt Lake Valley. He was looking for grass where cattle could graze away from the valley’s gardens, and he and his family lived out of a wagon that first winter. Bountiful is considered the second community the Latter-day Saints settled in Utah. Work on the white Bountiful Tabernacle began in 1857 with timber hauled from the surrounding mountains. Some immigrants lived in its basement until they could buy land and build shelter. It was dedicated on March 14 and 15, 1863. Stiff east winds have since toppled its spires several times.

Two stake presidents in February

Until 1950, Pioneer Day on July 24 was kept around Bountiful by neighborhood wards and the occasional stake activity. Families who wanted a big-city celebration drove into Salt Lake City for the Days of ‘47. Oral history and cursory notes from a 1952 committee meeting place the beginning of Handcart Days on February 28, 1950. That day the presidents of the Bountiful and South Davis Stakes met and agreed to combine their separate Pioneer Day festivities into one celebration for the whole community. Little is recorded of that first year. South Davis County then had fewer than 8,000 residents, and the celebration consisted of two events and fewer than 2,500 participants. It was led, as every one since has been, by a Grand Parade through downtown Bountiful.

By 1952 and 1953 residents were being urged to “Stay at home, Be at home,” and to skip the 12-mile drive south. The first official theme, in 1953, was “Old Folks.” The weather did not always cooperate. In 1955 a late-July snowstorm was among the misfortunes that obliged the local stakes to cover the celebration’s costs.

In 1962 the parade reenacted the first known Bountiful and South Davis County parade. The same year it moved to the day before the Days of ‘47 parade, to avoid competing with it head-on. During the 1960s the separate children’s parade was disbanded and children were invited into the Grand Parade. In the middle of that decade the junior and senior high school bands began marching in it.

A delayed shell and a tabernacle fireside

In the 1970s a delayed firework shell injured the family of a former Bountiful mayor, and the fireworks disappeared for the rest of the decade. Other events came in. A pioneer-theme fireside began to be held regularly, an amateur art show was added, and the old two-day format was dropped. In 1988 the church’s Area Presidency asked all the stakes to support the celebration and directed its revenue toward future celebrations. A performance stage was built in Bountiful Park in 1989. The fireworks returned in 1991 under strict fire code and safety restrictions. In the early 1990s Bountiful City and the church agreed that the church would again carry most of the money and the manpower.

In 1998, with Dr. M. David Hansen as chairman, the committee approved initiatives to keep Handcart Days a community celebration rather than build it into a rival to the Days of ‘47. The 1999 Family Fireside moved to the Bountiful Tabernacle and its grounds, and the church General Authority John H. Groberg gave the main address. The same year produced the largest parade to date and the most money ever raised by the park activities. Across all its events the celebration counted more than 125,000 participants and nearly 5,000 volunteers. The history also reports that the National Parade Association listed the Grand Parade among America’s largest in the late 1990s. That history was written in 1999 by Matthew D. Hanson and Brad Cowley, University of Utah students and volunteers, who worked mostly from the archives of the Davis County Clipper and the Deseret News. It went to the Library of Congress’s Local Legacies project with the support of Congressman James V. Hansen. Handcart Days marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2000.

On July 21, 2006, the 150th year since the first handcart companies, the Church News measured the parade route at 1.5 miles, with the tabernacle spires as its landmark. More than 100 entries took part, and several had youth and adults in pioneer clothes pulling handcarts. An estimated 50,000 to 70,000 people watched in 100-degree heat, finding shade under trees and in the shadows of buildings. Afterward, at the park, people pulled handcarts and sawed logs.

The 2012 parade was the 62nd. It started about six o’clock on a Friday evening, and some spectators had claimed their places along the route by seven that morning. Because the parade had grown too popular for a longer line, the committee limited it to 85 entries. One of them was the Sons of Helaman, more than 2,000 young men marching as the stripling warriors of the Book of Mormon in a line 400 yards long. Each carried a wooden staff with a nail in its foot, and every four steps they struck the pavement together.