Johnny Appleseed Days

On the first weekend in October, Johnny Appleseed Days takes over Terry Ashe Park at 6626 Skyway in Paradise. Admission is free. At the Noble Orchards booth, visitors sample apples and carry them off loose or by the bag. By the Chamber of Commerce’s account, the Noble family has grown fruit in Paradise for more than a century. In the Pie Pavilion, slices of apple pie baked in Paradise by Save Mart are served with ice cream. In the children’s area, Johnny Appleseed appears with fruit and stories.

The Paradise Ridge Chamber of Commerce runs the festival and has sponsored it since 1937. Its own pages call the event “California’s oldest Harvest Festival.” In 2026 it marked 138 years, counting from 1888. For that weekend, October 3 and 4, organizers told KRCR they expected between 5,000 and 6,000 people to pass through the park.

Pie, cider and the Gazebo Stage

The 2026 festival map showed more than 100 vendors selling handcrafted goods and local products. Local businesses and community organizations set up alongside them, with artisans from across the state and beyond. The food court has outdoor seating. Its 2026 roster included kettle corn and lemon shakers, Dippin’ Dots, Indian food from Guzzetti’s Catering, bread from Great Harvest Bread Co., Twisted Sisters Soda Co., Kona Ice of Chico, Cohasset Nuts, and a booth run by E Clampus Vitus. The Chamber thanked the CCC crew for its work on the pie tradition.

Hometown entertainment runs continuously on the Gazebo Stage, which the 2026 map called the Hometown Stage. That year the band Soul Posse was listed for Sunday afternoon at two o’clock. The Paradise Unified School District puts on the Children’s Games Plaza. Grocery Outlet sponsored the Harvest Grove and Pumpkin Patch.

In 2026 the festival also spread into the Paradise Veterans Memorial Hall, beside the park at 6550 Skyway. The ground floor held a new Home on the Ridge Expo, where people in real estate, building, insurance, landscaping, and the arts met visitors thinking of settling on the Ridge. Upstairs, on the hall’s mezzanine, American Legion Paradise Post 259 hosted Cider on the Ridge for those 21 and over, with sampling and full pours. All alcohol had to stay on the mezzanine. The Chamber’s announcement said Cider on the Ridge “returns.” KRCR reported that hard cider was offered for the first time that year.

Mark Thorp of the Chamber described the festival’s growth to KRCR: “What started in a very small capacity in the late 1800s, 19th century, came off pretty small, starting off with a few individuals getting together, but it has grown since till we have now which is one of the state’s most important events.”

A saloon rolled on logs

The small start Thorp described was a celebration over a building. Monica Nolan, executive director of the Chamber, told the Town’s Make It Paradise site the story as she knows it. “Back in 1888, the ladies of the temperance society managed to get ahold of ownership of the local saloon, something they wanted to do for a long time,” she said. The saloon stood at the corner of Clark Road and Elliott, where Riebes Auto Store is now. “They rolled the saloon building across the street on logs to where the Rite Aid is now and rechristened it a community hall.”

Marion Israel wrote of that year in a 1964 edition of Tales of the Paradise Ridge: “The neighborhood saloon had become the temperance headquarters for the community. So thankful were the majority of the people over a victory that a Harvest Home Festival was held. This first of the long series of festivals, fairs and apple shows in Paradise was a joyous success.” Records of the event list fruit exhibits, armfuls of wheat, and corn on the cob, along with everything from eggs to pumpkins. One attendee wrote, “We realized when we saw that produce that lots could be raised in Paradise.”

Until the 1880s the Ridge had been mostly a community of homestead farmers. Mass fruit production was new. Over the next years the small produce fairs went on, and the same account says they marked the Ridge’s change from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture. The 2017 Paradise Post reported a local saying that the town once held dozens of orchards within its limits.

Irrigation talk and a Robin Hood

By 1905 the Ladies Aid Society was running the event for the benefit of the Paradise Polytechnic Institute. It renamed the gathering the Fruit and Flower Festival. A festival dinner cost twenty-five cents a plate.

Ten years later the talk turned to water. Farmers knew production could not grow without a better water system. Israel wrote of the 1915 festival: “All day among those of more serious interest, residents and visitors, the talk was irrigation, irrigation, irrigation.” Then she added: “The realization of the community’s hopes was the organization, in 1916, of the Paradise Irrigation District.” Fruit production grew afterward.

In 1937 the Paradise and Allied Communities Chamber of Commerce, now the Paradise Ridge Chamber, took on official sponsorship as a way for local growers to market their produce. Warner Brothers was then filming The Adventures of Robin Hood down in Bidwell Park, and the crew was a draw that year. The Sunday evening program had nothing special planned. The record notes that “an impromptu feature was the personal appearance of Mr. Errol Flynn, the Robin Hood of the film, who was called to the platform and spoke briefly.”

The 1937 crowds pressed another point. Nolan said the event “drew attention to the need for better roads for commerce and agriculture.” Travel between Chico, Oroville, and Gridley called for regraded roadways. A new farm-to-market road helped visitors return for the 1938 festival. A surviving program from 1952 calls the event the Apple Festival, and by 1953 it had events for the “small fry.”

Johnny Appleseed’s name, 1959 and after

The festival had been the Paradise Fall Festival. In 1959 it became Johnny Appleseed Days, a change the Make It Paradise account credits to the success of the town’s Gold Nugget Days. The new name honors John Chapman, a traveling nurseryman who carried apple seeds to many eastern states in the first half of the nineteenth century. The same account notes that he had nothing to do with the festival’s origins.

The event has moved among many locations over its life. In 2017, the 129th festival at Terry Ashe Park expected nearly 110 vendors, with face painting and caramel apples. Nolan said then that volunteers would bake one thousand apple pies in the week before. The Town’s own page still describes residents and Chamber members baking that many pies, sold whole and by the slice.

After the fire, the Town’s account says, Johnny Appleseed Days was one of the most important events to return. Vendors and partners changed old traditions to suit a rebuilding community. Save Mart took over baking and donating the pies, and DIY apple pie kits joined the program. The Chamber and volunteer Paradisians gather each year to fill pie kits with apples from Noble Orchards, and Save Mart bakes the pies.