Klamath Basin Potato Festival

At eleven o’clock on Friday, October 16, 2026, Umpqua Bank opens a free baked potato bar at the Merrill Civic Center, and the Klamath Basin Potato Festival begins. The bar runs two hours. In 2019, when the bank handed out 400 to 500 baked potatoes with all the toppings, the city’s notice advised, “Better get there early because they go quickly.” At one o’clock the exhibit hall and vendor booths open, and they stay open until five.

Merrill sits in the Lost River Valley of Klamath County, ten miles north of Tulelake, California. The festival marks the end of the potato harvest in a basin that the Herald and News says plants about 7,000 acres of the crop. The Merrill Lions Club hosts it on the third weekend of October, and admission is free.

Saturday on Front Street

Saturday starts before the exhibits do. The third annual Tater Trot 5k, a fundraiser for Tater Tots Pediatric Therapy, leaves 415 North Main Street at 8 a.m. It drew 63 runners in 2025. The hall reopens at nine, and at eleven the parade steps off. The 2026 listing puts the parade on Front Street. The Herald and News described the 2025 parade going down Main Street, with school marching bands, vintage tractors, and local royalty waving from decorated hay bales. Photographs from 2021 show more of what passes:

• a Lost River FFA member leading a cow down Front Street
• a Shrine Club member high-fiving the crowd from a replica Tin Lizzie
• Russ Hatch and friends riding in a 1942 Army Jeep
• the festival queen tossing candy while children ran to pick it up
• Tanner Cheyne covering his daughter Juniper’s ears as the firetrucks went by with their sirens blasting

After the parade the Lions Club serves a free barbecue from 12:30 to 3 p.m. In 2025 volunteers handed out pulled pork sandwiches with baked potatoes. They served more than 1,200 people before the food ran out. In 2019 the club planned on BBQ beef for 1,500 to 2,000. The afternoon also brings live music, a beer garden, Pop Warner football, and a potato-peeling contest. In 2025 the music and beer were on the football field beside the Civic Center. The contest that year was called the Peel-a-Bucket of Potatoes and was held on the Civic Center field at 1 p.m. A free health fair ran in the Civic Center all day, and a raffle drawing at three closed the festival.

Russets on the exhibit tables

Inside the hall, the Herald and News found tables of entries from local students and farmers in 2025: sculpted potatoes, agricultural science projects, and packed boxes of Russets judged for size, shape, and quality. Growers competed for Best Russet, Largest Potato, and Best Overall Display. The 2019 call for entries asked for the biggest, strangest, and most uniform potatoes, vegetables, and fruit, along with floral design, quilting, photographs, and paintings. It added, “If there is not a category for your entry, we will make one.” That year the Friends of Merrill museum also set up inside the Civic Center.

“That’s my favorite part — seeing the projects that area students come up with,” Lions Club President Barb Dehlinger told the paper. “Their imagination has no end.” Of the crop itself she said, “What used to be a single variety has now grown into many.”

By midday on the 2025 Saturday, long lines had formed at the entrance, and the paper counted the crowd in thousands. The paper also called the weekend a rare common ground in a basin often divided by water and land use. Farmers came from across the region, Tulelake included. “Our Potato Festival is more than just Merrill,” said Lions Club Secretary Diane Ongman. “It’s the entire Basin, and it truly is community spirit at its finest.”

Five schools and a grand marshal

The royalty is chosen before the festival begins. A talent show and coronation dinner was scheduled for Sunday, October 11, 2026, at 365 East Front Street. Five high schools sent queen candidates:

• Lost River: Addison Rawson
• Tulelake: Lupita Alcala
• Bonanza: Abby Hill
• Mazama: Sophia Gonzalez
• Crosspoint Christian: Brianna Olney

Each candidate sells $2 raffle tickets, and every sale counts toward her score for queen or runner-up, both of which carry a scholarship. The raffle’s grand prize is $500 in cash. The two Junior Princesses, Jude Beeson-Garcia and Natalie Noles, both attend Merrill Elementary. Jude is a kindergartener.

The 2026 theme is “Stars, Stripes, and Spuds,” and the grand marshals are the Greg Matthews Family. The festival’s tribute to Matthews is written in the past tense. It says he went to work for the City of Merrill in October 2001. He created the Modoc War Museum, Flag Pole Park, and Good Duck Park, and he founded the Lost River Bluegrass Festival. He coached Little League, taught local children guitar, and played fiddle with his granddaughter Evelyn. Wherever he went, his dog, Bugle Ann, followed. Earlier marshals included Martin and Darlene Hicks in 2021 and Bill and Shirley Beasley in 2019. The theme in 2019 was “Spud-iversary, Let’s Celebrate,” and in 2025 it was “Spudtober.”

Twenty-five cents on the front street

Merrill was a wheat town before it was a potato town. The city’s history records that Nathan and Nancy Merrill bought land on the north side of Lost River in 1891. They had Antone Castel survey a town site there in 1894, the same year the Thomas Martin flour mill was completed. The Herald and News gives 1890 as the town’s founding year. By 1909 the mill had earned Merrill the name “Flour City.” The town then burned three times, in 1911, 1920, and 1921, and was rebuilt each time. Two railroads reached it in the early 1930s.

An exhibit at the Tulelake-Butte Valley Fairgrounds museum, part of Tule Lake National Monument, tells how the festival started. In the fall of 1934 the Merrill Service Club set up small displays and a fenced area on Merrill’s front street and charged 25 cents admission. Basin-grown potatoes were the centerpiece, and a modest barbecue was served in the basement of the Merrill Community Hall. The crowning of a queen began in 1936. Soon the program grew to a barbecue, a parade, displays, a football game, and a dance. During the Second World War it shrank to a late harvest dance.

Most sources, Travel Oregon among them, give 1934 as the first year. The Herald and News, writing in October 2025, said the festival began in 1938. The count of editions does not line up either. The city called 2019 the 82nd, Basin Life called 2020 the 84th, the Herald and News called 2025 the 88th, and a 2026 listing calls 2026 the 86th. Travel Oregon names the festival one of only 11 in the state designated an official Oregon Heritage Tradition.

Basin Life wrote in 2020 that over the years the festival had changed the queens’ gowns, the rules of the parade, and the commercial potatoes on display. Its program had shrunk from ten-page booklets to five-page flyers. “The potato, tuber, or spud allowed this festival to survive drought, taxes, and NO WATER,” it wrote. “But, ‘Gold WAS DISCOVERED in MERRILL.’ The POTATO.”