Homer Davenport Days

At noon on the Sunday of Homer Davenport Days, teams line up on Main Street in Silverton with their couches. The Barb Rue Memorial Davenport Races bill themselves as “People-Powered Home Furnishings.” The races run in heats: four-man, two-man, four-woman, two-woman, coed, and a Masters race for racers over forty. Teams bring their rigs to the Race Pit Preview by 11 a.m., and judging follows at 11:30 for “Mayor’s Choice” and “Best Racer.” A team without a couch can borrow one of the regulation loaner Davenport Racers kept by the Homer Race Committee. In a 2026 post the festival thanked Drew Carney for coming down twelve years earlier to highlight the races. The 2027 races are set for Sunday, August 8.

The races close a festival that has been Silverton’s primary multi-day event since 1980. It is held the first weekend in August, and admission is free. Most of it takes place in Coolidge-McClaine Park, a treed city park beside Silver Creek with a covered pavilion and picnic sections spread along the creek and the shaded hillside. A December 2025 storm damaged the park and closed it through the spring of 2026. Crews removed and pruned hazard trees that April with a biologist and a bird surveyor on hand, and some of the wood went to Marion County Youth Corrections. The 2026 festival was held in the park that August.

The park by Silver Creek

Vendors from across the Northwest set up in the park. Organizers counted about 100 arts and crafts vendors for 2026. Food Row runs a line of international food carts serving lunch and dinner each day, and a children’s area has rides and a climbing wall. The Homer Invitational Brew Fest, added in 2021, brings breweries from around the state, along with ciders. The 2026 beer garden poured Vitis Ridge wine, and Breakside Brewers of Milwaukie was on the list. The organizers say anyone may listen to the music without buying anything. It starts Friday at 4 p.m. and runs into Sunday evening. The 2026 stage carried Rae Gordon, Kivett Bednar, Lexi Tucker, Hucklebuck Highway, Stormy Creek Company (formerly Freight Train Jane Band), Ben Rice & PDX Hustle, and the Nikki Jones Band, among others. First Student buses shuttle visitors between the park, the Dollar Tree parking lot, and, on Saturday, Silver Falls Brewery.

Saturday downtown

On Saturday the Flywheels Car Show opens at 8 a.m. next to Silver Falls Brewery. At 9:45 runners take the parade route ahead of the parade itself, an arrangement that began in 2026. The Homer Parade steps off at 10 through Silverton’s historic downtown with floats, antique automobiles, bands, and dancers. Entries form up around 9 in the Middle School parking lot. In 2026 the grand marshal was 25 military veterans, students from the Silverton High School Performing Arts carried the banners, and Dan Schacher and Doug Ousterhout called the parade from the High Water Grill. Barrels along the route collect non-perishable food for Silverton Area Community Aid. Cub Scouts race derby cars that afternoon and give awards on the Main Stage. On Sunday morning a 5K leaves Silverton High School at 9.

The weekend opens on Thursday night downtown. The 2026 kickoff party was run with the Silverton Chamber of Commerce and offered a street dance, beer, vendors, cornhole, family games, and a glass blowing demonstration. Pie sold for $5 a slice or $25 for the whole pie. “[The Kickoff] is the same as we always do for First Friday,” said Stacy Palmer, the chamber’s executive director. In August it becomes a “First Thursday.” Visitors who shopped at Silverton businesses in the week of the festival could bring a receipt to the beer garden for one free drink. Festival board member Deanne Feller explained the reason: “Because we get a lot of push back saying that weekend is hard for businesses.” She added, “Our whole mission is to support local.”

Rotary, scholarships, and the cartoon contest

The Silverton Rotary Club has run the festival since 2010, at the community’s request. In the same year it took over the Silverton Hills Strawberry Festival, held on Father’s Day, where shortcake sold for $8 in 2026. The Homer festival board funds student scholarships. In 2025 it presented a $10,000 check to Silverton Area Community Aid, and in 2026 it awarded $1,000 each to Levi McGraw and Hope Wanderscheid. “It’s a fun festival, but it also gives back,” Feller said.

In 2014 the local historian Gus Frederick, later president of the Silverton Country Historical Society, spoke of wanting to “put the Homer back in Homer Days.” He planned to bring Davenport Arabian horses and their breeders to the parade, to show a set of eight original Davenport cartoons he had bought “for a song,” and to revive the international cartoon contest of earlier years. In 2026 the festival held a coloring contest for all ages instead, with a $25 gift card for each age group. “The coloring contest is new because we’re not doing the cartoon contest (this year),” Feller said. Frederick has also questioned the man’s public image. “Homer cultivated this ‘country boy’ persona which is totally bogus,” he said. “He was not a country hick … he had a father who was quite intellectual to say the least.”

The boy from the Waldo Hills

Homer Calvin Davenport was born March 8, 1867, in the Waldo Hills several miles south of Silverton. He was the fourth child of Timothy Woodbridge Davenport, later called “The Sage of Silverton,” a surveyor of Marion County and state representative, and Florinda “Flora” Geer Davenport. Two of their children died in infancy. Flora admired the Harper’s Weekly cartoons of Thomas Nast. Wikipedia says that while pregnant she came to believe her child would become as famous a cartoonist as Nast. She died of smallpox in 1870, when Homer was three. By Wikipedia’s account, on her deathbed she asked her husband to give Homer “every opportunity” to become a cartoonist. The Oregon Encyclopedia gives it as family lore that she asked him to nurture the boy’s art above all else.

That winter the family was quarantined, and Timothy told his son stories of Arab people and their horses. At three years and nine months the boy painted a picture he called “Arabian horses.” The Oregon Historical Society holds an early Arabian horse drawing, made with a match and fruit juice, attributed to him at three. In 1873 the family moved to Silverton, then a village of 300. Davenport later said the move was so he “might live in the Latin Quarter of that village and inhale any artistic atmosphere that was going to waste.” Apart from milking the cows, he was to “study faces and draw.” The villagers liked him but considered him shiftless. For years he kept an empty horse-liniment can bearing an Arabian-type horse as his “only piece of artistic furniture.” In his late teens he left town with a small circus as a clown and horse-tender, and he quit after being told to oil the elephant.

Plaid suits and desert horses

His first paid newspaper work was for the Oregonian. Wikipedia dates it to 1889. The Oregon Encyclopedia names a drawing of the steamboat Columbia Queen published May 19, 1890. William Randolph Hearst hired him at the San Francisco Examiner and in 1895 took him to the New York Journal. There, in the 1896 campaign, Davenport drew McKinley’s manager Mark Hanna as a hulking brute in “plutocratic plaid,” each square marked with a tiny dollar sign. A year later his work prompted a failed Anti-Cartoon Bill in the New York State Assembly. In 1904, working for the New York Evening Mail, he drew Uncle Sam with a hand on Theodore Roosevelt’s shoulder, a cartoon said by many to have enabled the president’s election. Roosevelt helped him in turn in 1906 with diplomatic permission to travel to Syria. Davenport lived among the Anazeh people, went through a brotherhood ceremony with his Bedouin guide, and brought 27 horses home. The Davenport Arabians descend from that herd.

He lectured in the United States and Europe on cartoons, satire, and Silverton. In letters home he told relatives not to send him anything that reminded him of the town, because it would plunge him into despair. His autobiography, The Country Boy, appeared in 1910. In April 1912 he was sent to the New York docks to cover the Titanic survivors, caught pneumonia while waiting, and died on May 2. Hearst had his body returned to Silverton for burial and paid for the funeral, a Freethought service officiated by the Oregon spiritualist Jean Morris Ellis.