Hay Days

On the Saturday of Hay Days, the Tremonton City Council serves breakfast. The Pancakes in the Park meal is free. It follows the Hay Days Redneck Run, which starts at 7:30 a.m., and it is laid out at Jeanie Stevens Park, 700 North 1000 West, just north of the Box Elder County Fairgrounds. After breakfast the 2026 program filled the park with a car and bike show, food trucks, a baby contest, cornhole tournaments, live entertainment, bingo, and a bubble party and water fight.

Hay Days is the city’s summer celebration, run by Tremonton City and its recreation department. Chaiya Wimber, the community events coordinator, describes its reach plainly: “We’re really trying to hit everybody’s different demographic so that everyone has something that they can enjoy.” According to the Tremonton Leader, the 2025 celebration drew about 6,000 people over its weekend.

A week at Jeanie Stevens Park

The 2026 festival ran July 20 through 25 and took America’s 250th anniversary as its theme. Its weekend had grown into a full week. On Monday a patriotic scavenger hunt opened on the Goosechase app, with themed challenges for individuals and families to complete through the week for prizes. On Tuesday a flag retirement ceremony took place in the Grand Arena at the fairgrounds. Residents brought worn American flags to the ceremony or left them beforehand at the city offices, and an interfaith patriotic singalong followed. On Wednesday came a pickleball tournament with beginner and advanced divisions.

Thursday belonged to teenagers. Teen Freedom Night was a glow-in-the-dark party with games and music, open to teens only. “We’re going to do Twister with glow-in-the-dark paint, so that’s going to be a little messy,” Wimber told the Leader, laughing. “The first 100 kids get free pizza.”

The traditional two days began Friday afternoon, July 24, when local vendors opened at 4:00 p.m. Bounce houses and train rides ran alongside a community dinner benefiting the American Legion. Mike Hamiton, whom the Leader called a world-class magician, gave a magic show. The evening also held the Little Bounceroo Rodeo and a home run derby, and “National Treasure” was screened outdoors at dusk.

Guns, hoses, and a storm over the golf course

The Saturday game people come to watch is Guns & Hoses, a softball game between the Tremonton-Garland Police Department and the Tremonton Fire Department. “We just love to watch them play because they’re always funny to watch,” Wimber said. “They enjoy it so much.”

On the evening of July 25, 2026, the vendors stayed open until 10:00 p.m. Children rode patriotic bikes through the park in a Kids Bike Parade, and the Kap Brothers Band took the stage. The fireworks were to close the night. Then weather came in, and the recreation department posted a change: “Fireworks are coming early to beat the storm! Starting at 9:30, look up at the Golf Course.”

A program that changes each July

The festival’s parts change from year to year. In 2024 Hay Days fell on July 19 and 20. The community dinner cost $3 a plate, Sage Valley played Friday, and “The Incredibles” was the movie in the park. Saturday held a talent show, a chalk art contest, a rec baseball sportsmanship all-star game, and a concert by Factory Street and Main, with fireworks at 10 p.m.

In 2025, on July 25 and 26, Friday’s lineup included a roping contest, a diaper derby, and a ventriloquist show. The proceeds of that year’s community dinner went to Tremonton’s Food Pantry. Saturday opened with a 5K and added a volleyball tournament, and the scavenger hunt ranged across the Bear River Valley. Mayor Lyle Holmgren put out the invitation in the Leader: “I encourage every family, neighbor and newcomer to participate!”

From City Days to Hay Days

For years the celebration had a plainer name. “For the last 20 years, we’ve done our City Days event, which is pretty common for most Utah towns,” Wimber said in 2026. Under that name it had other features. In July 2018 the Bear River Valley Museum at 11 East Main Street put on a free fashion show for Tremonton City Days, the fifth year the museum had done one alongside the celebration. Twenty dresses from the museum’s collection, one for each decade of the 20th century, were modeled by 10 to 15 locals. The models walked down the stairs from the building’s upper level, circled the main display room, and climbed back up. One dress was modeled by the granddaughter of Audrey Johnson, the first queen of Wheat and Beet Days in neighboring Garland.

The Leader reported in 2024 that the city changed the name to Hay Days in 2021 as a nod to its agricultural heritage. Wimber, in 2026, put the change at “around five years ago,” and added, “it’s just growing every single year.” City officials say the name honors the wheat, grass, straw, alfalfa and other crops that helped establish the community. The Leader’s 2025 coverage singled out hay, which it said has shaped the local economy and landscape for generations. “It always comes back to those roots,” Wimber said. “This is our biggest celebration that we do for anything.”

Those roots reach back to a German colony. The Leader states that Tremonton was founded in 1903 by German farmers and others drawn to the valley’s fertile land and abundant irrigation. The Wikipedia account of the town begins earlier. Its first settlers came in 1888, but the area stayed largely empty until land agents began promoting the Bear River Valley to Midwestern farmers. Small groups from Nebraska and Illinois arrived from 1898. Between 1901 and 1904 an Apostolic Christian Church group came, most of them from Tremont, Illinois, with a few families from Ohio and Kansas. Because most were of German descent, they were called the “German colony.”

When the townsite was laid out in 1903, the colony asked that it be named Tremont. Within four years the post office renamed it Tremonton, because mail was being confused with Fremont in central Utah. Around 1907 the congregation was caught up in a wider schism in the Apostolic Church, some families moved back to the Midwest, and the colony came to an end. The town kept the name they had asked for, with two letters added by the post office.