Strasburg Hometown Days

At ten o’clock on the Saturday of Hometown Days, the parade leaves the corner of Colfax and Wagner in Strasburg. It runs east on Colfax to Adams Street, turns north on Adams to Colorado Avenue, and ends at the Strasburg School grounds. The entry form sorts what comes down the street into floats, farm equipment, animals, law enforcement, military, musical, religious, and children ten and under. Automobiles and tractors are grouped by age, from 1941 and older through the current years, with separate classes for street rods and off-road machines. The 2026 theme was “Hometown American Spirit.”

The grand marshals in 2024 were Cheryl and Ed Humbert, who both grew up in Strasburg. Ed graduated from Strasburg High School in 1976 and Cheryl in 1980. They raised three children in town and have run Strasburg Auto Parts for years. Cheryl’s father, Harvey Crandall, was the first owner of that store. He and his wife Eileen built and opened Crandall Auto Parts and the Strasburg Self Serv gas station in 1976, after Harvey spent two years digging basements for new houses, their own among them.

Four days across town

The festival falls on the second full weekend in August and spreads across Strasburg. Events run at the Parks & Rec grounds on Wagner and Burton streets, the high school on Colorado Avenue, the museum on East Colfax, Mountain View Fellowship on Headlight Road, and several churches. The Strasburg Hometown Days Committee coordinates it with the Strasburg Fire District, the Strasburg Parks & Rec District, and Strasburg School District 31J. Most activities are free.

The 2026 festival opened on Thursday, August 6, with “Night at the Museum.” Curator Cliff Smith presented “Strasburg Then & Now” at the Legion Hall on Westview Avenue, with light refreshments and donations taken for the museum. On Friday evening the kickoff filled Community Park on Wagner Street. Visitors brought camp chairs and blankets, and coolers and pets were not allowed. There were food trucks, sand volleyball, yard games, sidewalk chalk, bounce houses, and rock painting with the Strasburg Arts Council. A beer garden poured Launch Pad Brewery’s four flagship beers, with proceeds to youth programs. A cornhole tournament raised money for the high school wrestling team. At seven, Halfway to Headlight played, billed on the schedule as “our favorite hometown band.” At nine, the Strasburg Fire Protection District set off fireworks, weather permitting.

The fireworks have gone up in dry years. On August 15, 2020, CBS Colorado reported that Strasburg planned its Hometown Days show while four wildfires burned out of control elsewhere in the state. Josie Fischer of the fire district said a private technician would launch the pyrotechnics in the presence of “multiple fire apparatus.” “It’s easy for us to find a huge dirt pasture,” she added. That year, people watched from their homes or cars.

Saturday in 2026 began at 7:30 a.m. with the Run to the Rails 5K, followed by a trap shoot at Mountain View Fellowship. An indoor arts and crafts show and an outdoor vendor fair ran at the high school. After the parade, the school district served a free community barbecue at the high school, with the Golden Eagle Concert Band playing. The schedule advised bringing camp chairs and umbrellas. Hay rides ran through the afternoon. From three to five at the rec grounds, SHS Unified Bowling and the Comanche VIP Seniors hosted a chili cook-off, a pie baking contest, a petting zoo, and a watermelon feed, with the High Plains Music Ensemble playing. In the early evening Journey Church gave away hot dogs and Italian sodas and set up cooling stations. Mountain View Fellowship served a free pulled pork dinner, and Two Left Boots taught line dancing. At dusk, “Hoppers” was shown outdoors at the rec grounds as a fundraiser for Big D’s Warriors.

Sunday opened with the ‘Burg 5K, which welcomed runners, walkers, and strollers and included a pancake breakfast. The high school’s FBLA chapter served biscuits and gravy or pancakes with sausage at Hemphill Middle School, at $7 for adults and $5 for children twelve and under. Strasburg Community Church held a car show judged in Off-Road, Modern, Classic, and Best of Show. Youth and adult teams played mud volleyball at Wolf Creek Run West. At eleven, the cow plop for American Legion Post #183 moved to a new location at the Community Church; ticket holders guess where the cow will “plop.” The weekend closed at 5:30 p.m. with the Big D’s Warriors’ adaptive baseball game, the last of their season, where the players met Dinger from the Colorado Rockies.

Root beer floats on East Colfax

On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the Comanche Crossing Historical Society opens its museum at 56060 East Colfax Avenue and sells root beer floats. In 2026 the museum offered tours, cow milking for children, and model train displays. On Saturday the Corridor Creative Arts League gave a live painting demonstration and showed watercolors, and Hometown Kids Daycare held a texting contest on the grounds. The organizers’ page calls the museum “one of the best kept secrets in the state.”

The property covers two acres on the west edge of town and holds the museum and other historical structures. One of them is the Living Springs School. Ed Humbert’s grandmother, Beaula Barrois, taught there; she and her husband Orie had homesteaded in the Living Springs area north of town. Each July the one-room schoolhouse holds week-long Pioneer School classes, with children aged six to twelve taught together as in pioneer times.

In March 2024 the directors of the Strasburg Metropolitan Parks & Recreation District voted unanimously to acquire the museum property. By mid-June the deed had been filed with Adams County. Under the arrangement, the historical society leases the property back for a minimal fee, and curator Cliff Smith and his volunteers continue to run the museum. “The museum is truly a community treasure and we are so excited to work with the Comanche Crossing Historical Society to partner on events … and ensure that the museum stays open and operational,” said Angie Graf, the district’s administrator. The I-70 Scout reported that the first notable difference would come with the Hometown Days historical presentation that August.

A barrel of whiskey near milepost 602

A marker on the museum grounds, erected by the historical society in 2008, gives the event the festival commemorates. At 3:00 p.m. on August 15, 1870, at a point 928 feet east of railroad milepost 602, Kansas Pacific crews working west from Kansas and east from Denver spiked the last rails. The marker calls the result the nation’s “first truly continuous coast-to-coast rail road.” The place is called Comanche Crossing, after a creek the marker describes as “usually dry but sometimes rampaging.” It lies about three-quarters of a mile east of present-day Strasburg. On the final day, the marker says, the crews laid a record 10¼ miles of track in nine hours to win a barrel of whiskey that “canny foremen” had placed midway in the final gap.

The festival’s own telling puts an American flag beside a keg of whiskey at the center of those last miles. It says there was no big celebration. The first crew to reach the center would win; the eastern crew got there first and kept laying track until it met the western crew. The 1970 National Register nomination adds that no silver or golden spike was driven, unlike at Promontory. It describes the site as 3,812 feet east of the Strasburg depot, on open prairie about 38 miles east of Denver, “giving little hint of the railroad history made there.”

The claim to “first continuous” rests on bridges. The nomination quotes O. E. Davis’s argument. The 1869 junction at Promontory, Utah, Davis wrote, left a 1,500-foot gap at the Missouri River in Omaha, which was crossed by ferry. That gap was closed for only 66 days in early 1870, when track was laid across the ice. The Kansas Pacific route through Denver used a Missouri River bridge at Kansas City, completed June 30, 1869. By Davis’s account, it was the only all-rail route across the country from August 15, 1870, until the Union Pacific bridge at Omaha opened on March 22, 1872. The site entered the National Register on August 10, 1970. The nomination expected the centennial five days later to be observed “in a series of parades, barbecues, speech making, etc.”

Twenty-five entries in 1970

Hometown Days began that August, in 1970, to celebrate the opening of the Comanche Crossing Historical Society’s new museum and to raise money for it. The first day opened with a parade, followed by bread making, wheat threshing, and a re-enactment of the joining of the rails. The museum ran the celebration for several years until a Hometown Days Committee was formed. The parade had 25 entries in 1970 and over 100 by 2005.

The I-70 Scout’s 2017 account described a committee of ten volunteers, some with more than twenty years of service. It listed a program held on the school grounds and at the museum: a quilt show, a rodeo, a doll show, mud volleyball, a chili cook-off, a watermelon feed, and a car show. The museum hosted the community church service on Sunday and sold root beer floats. That year the Comanche VIP Seniors sold breakfast burritos at Bob’s Repair Shop on East Colfax before and after the parade.

Karen Kay Tangeman graduated from Strasburg High School in 1968 and married Lee Tangeman in October 1970. For more than thirty years she worked for IREA, known as “The REA Lady” for reading meters in the small towns. She served on the Comanche Crossing Historical Society and the Hometown Days Committee and died on December 27, 2025. Her obituary named the historical society and Strasburg Hometown Days among the places to send memorial contributions.