Hay Days

Saturday on Main Street

The Wiley Lions Club starts the parade through town at 10 a.m. In 2026 Hay Days fell on June 13. By then the kids’ carnival games had been running for an hour, and they would go on until noon or until the prizes ran out. Food and craft vendors kept their tables open all day. The LE Motorcycle Club set up the car show, with sign-up the same morning and winners announced around 12:30 p.m. Best in Show was settled by community vote, and the winner took a cash prize. Drivers who wanted to could take their cars through the parade first and then park them at the show.

Around 1 p.m. a cruise ride left Wiley for McClave, Hasty and Lamar and looped back, with the proceeds going to the Ally Remembered Foundation. Master Yong Choi and his students from Sun Do Sul Martial Arts of Lamar gave a demonstration in the heat. Shane Wollert ran the ping pong ball drop “in pretty gusty winds,” the festival’s page reported afterward. Prizes were handed out, and the raffle drawings followed. The Lions Club served a sloppy Joe dinner.

The street dance began at 8 p.m. The organizers had gone back and forth over moving it to the community building. In the end they kept it outdoors and closed the one block of Main Street in front of the park, which the Town of Wiley had improved with a $28,665 grant from Great Outdoors Colorado. Dancers brought their own chairs, drinks and snacks. The 2026 hosts were running Hay Days for the first time, and that afternoon their page posted: “Today was super awesome, a couple of glitches of course but not too shabby for organizing Hay Days for the first time.”

A rock wall from military surplus

Ten years earlier the festival ran two days, June 17 and 18, 2016, and Chris Frost of the Lamar Ledger walked the grounds. Prowers County Sheriff Sam Zordel was running a climbing wall that belonged to Kiowa County. “It’s a 1033 surplus item,” he said. “The military gives it to you. It’s still useful, so if you spend the money to come get it they’ll give it to you.” He had found two more walls at Fort Riley, Kansas. Nani Meyeres watched her granddaughter on the wall: “She was doing okay until she got to the curve up there and then she bails.”

Lunch that year was Sloppy Jo’s, beans and potato chips from the Lions Club. Gid Semmens, who the paper said had served for 52 years, was handling the drinks. “You get to work in the community,” he said. Ruthie Esgar named her day as “Climbing the wall, getting your picture taken, the dunk tank and Sloppy Jo’s,” and she said the ice cream was the best part. Deby Courkamp rode in the pickle barrel in the parade, and so did her granddaughter Samantha. There were balloon fights. The Wiley Panther cheerleaders sold apparel to pay for mats, and Missionary Baptist Church handed out Bibles.

At the car show Elmer Grett had his 1939 Ford, bought from a man in Hasty. “It was a rust bucket,” he said. It had taken 29 years of work. Jerry Smith showed a ‘34 Ford with a Coke carrier on the back, a truck he had owned for about 30 years and spent 20 putting together. County Commissioner Ron Cook said Smith had one of the first street rods in Lamar. “This is something that’s happened for a lot of years,” Cook said. Shae Krentz, who had coached the cheer squad for over 10 years, gave her own reason for coming: “A lot of people come home and you get to visit and see them.”

The Ledger’s photographs from the Friday-and-Saturday festival of 2019 show the same parade: the Prowers County Rural Fire Department truck, a Tempel Grain float, and riders of the Vaquero Club with children aboard, waving to the crowd.

A town named for a sugar man

Wiley sits on the plains 10 miles north and west of Lamar on Highway 287. A post office called Wiley has operated since 1907, and the town was incorporated on January 28, 1909. It takes its name from W. M. Wiley of Holly, president of the Holly Sugar Company. The Arkansas Valley subdivision of the Santa Fe railway once served the town.

The Lamar Chamber of Commerce lists what the young town held: five churches, a hotel, a drug store, a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, a pool hall, a millinery shop, a creamery and cheese factory, a pickle processing plant, a turkey processing plant, a brick factory and a newspaper, the Wiley Journal. The census counted 197 people in 1910 and 565 in 1920. In 2020 it counted 437. The Chamber puts the figure at 460, most of them working in Lamar. Three of the churches remain, along with the school, a bank, a medical clinic and Tucker’s Grocery, whose motto is “Tucker’s Top Meat at Top Prices.” The festival’s slogan, as the Chamber gives it, is “Down Wiley way its Kids and Hay.”