Hockinson Fun Days

Fun Days opens on a Friday evening in the commons of Hockinson High School. Doors open at 5:30, two bingo cards cost a dollar, and daubers are sold at the table. Prizes go to the winners, concessions and dinner are on hand, and the 2026 schedule says families are welcome. At the 2026 edition, held May 29 and 30, organizers reported that bingo attendance rose by about 20 percent over the year before.

Hockinson is an unincorporated community in Clark County, Washington, and its addresses run to Brush Prairie. The Hockinson School District, the Hockinson High School AAA Boosters Club and local volunteers put on the celebration. The boosters’ stated purpose is to support athletic, academic and activities programs at the high school. Kara Kadow had recently become event coordinator when she told The Reflector in 2026: “This is truly a community event … and just brings everybody out here across generations to have a good time.”

Pancakes, pulled pork and a dunk tank

Saturday begins at 7 a.m. at the Fire District 3 station. Firefighters serve pancakes, sausage, eggs, coffee and juice until 11:30, at $5 a person or $30 a family, and open the station for demonstrations. By 9 the Marketplace Bazaar is set up outdoors along the turnabout at the Hockinson School District Office, Saturday-market style. Food vendors there sell gyros, pizza, shave ice, hot dogs, brats, popcorn, lemonade and ice cream. Elim Lutheran Church holds a cruise-in it calls “Classics Then & Now,” with live music from Ten O’Clock Hill and what the schedule calls the church’s famous pulled pork sandwiches.

The Country Fair Carnival runs from 10 to noon and again from 1 to 3:30. The 2026 schedule puts it in the upper parking lot of the Hockinson Community Center, while The Reflector’s account of that year placed it inside the community center. There are carnival games, a cake walk, prizes, an apparel pop-up tent and a dunk tank. The schedule invites visitors to dunk school district teachers and staff after the parade. When parking in town runs out, free shuttles carry people in all day from the high school and the elementary school.

Fifty entries on 159th Street

Roads close at about 11:15 a.m. The parade steps off from the high school at noon and ends at Northeast 182nd Avenue and Northeast 164th Street. In 2026 it drew thousands to Northeast 159th Street and Northeast 182nd Avenue, with 50 entries from schools, businesses, civic groups and equestrian organizations.

The Clark County Sheriff’s Office led the parade, and one deputy stopped to high-five a young spectator. Behind came youth carrying the Fun Days banner and the Prairie High School JROTC. Children rode a hay-covered float from Short Acre Farm. Joe Zimmerman, finance and marketing director of Bi-Zi Farms, drove a tractor pulling a wagon. Princess River Williamson of the Clark County Fair Equestrian Court rode on horseback. Pacific Youth Cheerleading’s parade squad performed a routine, and the Hockinson Middle School Band marched past the community center. A Parties Inc. truck released bubbles, and children ran through the cloud.

Judges gave Best Float Entry to Hockinson Market for a cow-themed float. The Hockinson High School Band took Best Performance Entry, and First Student’s Hockinson school bus drivers won Best Motorized Entry. Latigo N Lace Equestrian earned Best Animal Entry, and Brush Prairie Singers took Best Youth Entry.

Eureka at the crossroads

The Columbian’s listing places the festival at the intersection of 159th and 182nd Avenue. According to the school district’s historical map, Eureka School opened on the northwest corner of that crossing in 1873. It was the first public school in the area.

Finnish settlers first called the place Eureka. When the town applied for a post office in the 1880s, Washington already had one by that name. The town took the name of its first postmaster, Ambrosius Hakanson, instead. Hockinson Market, the sponsor of the winning float, stands on the corner where that first post office was. Its building dates to 1928 and first housed the Hockinson Co-op Association of local dairy farmers.

Elim, between Hockinson and Brush Prairie, was named by Finnish Lutherans for a biblical village on the route of the Exodus. Elim Lutheran Church was established there in 1884. The Hockinson and Fifth Plain school districts consolidated on March 16, 1929. The high school whose boosters run Fun Days opened in 2003. Before then, generations of Hockinson students finished their schooling at Battle Ground High School, and many also attended Prairie High School.

Grand marshals and a Sunday picnic

The Reflector called Fun Days a long-standing tradition in 2013, and none of the pages give the year it began. The 2013 theme, “Hockinson Through the Ages,” celebrated the decades that made Hockinson “the community where we live, learn and give, beginning with its first school in 1870 through today,” in the words of the boosters’ press release. The district’s map gives 1873 for Eureka School.

That year the festival ran three days, Friday, May 31, through Sunday, June 2. Sunday brought a 5K Fun Run/Walk and Kids Mile at the high school track and an alumni picnic at Hockinson Meadows Community Park. Marlene Stensdotter was the contact for the alumni gathering in both 2012 and 2013.

The 2013 grand marshals were Rick and Jill Steele. Rick was an area fire captain and the first football coach at Hockinson High School, and he retired from coaching that year. Jill had spent many years at Hockinson Middle School and then served as vice principal at the high school. That year she became a principal in Kelso. The couple raised two children in the community. The year before, the honor went to Nick Cody, a Hockinson High School standout then playing football for the Oregon Ducks.

The 2012 Fun Days moved the carnival to the lower parking lot of the middle school and put the bazaar in the middle school gym. The carnival added pony rides, a free petting zoo and face painting. Fire District 3 held its 24th annual pancake breakfast that June, serving ham where the 2026 menu lists sausage. Proceeds went to research on gastrointestinal stromal tumors; area resident Shawna Miller had been diagnosed with the cancer on July 2, 2011. The 25th breakfast, in 2013, raised money for emergency medical equipment. Its open house included a Life Flight helicopter, an auto extrication demonstration, a Sheriff’s Office K-9 unit, and a real structure fire and rescue in the training tower.