Los Olivos Day in the Country

The 2026 Day in the Country, the forty-sixth by the Los Olivos Chamber’s count, falls on Saturday, October 10. It begins at the town flagpole. The 5K starts there at 8 a.m. and winds through downtown Los Olivos and its neighborhoods. A kids’ one-mile fun run follows at 9, from the same pole, and awards are given at 9:30. Runners check in at the corner park in the center of town.

Saturday on Grand Avenue

At 10 a.m. the parade steps off down Grand Avenue. For 2026 the chamber has asked for floats, classic old cars and jeeps, agricultural tractors and equipment, farm animals, “and any other charming ideas,” and it plans for 5,000 guests. Entrants gather beforehand in the field beside Saarloos Wagon Wheel Park at the north end of the street.

The main festival runs from 10 to 5 along the streets around Grand and Alamo Pintado Avenues. It has live music, craft vendors, food trucks, a kids’ zone, pumpkin decorating and a pumpkin patch. The 2025 festival added a beer garden and a scarecrow show. The chamber warns its vendors that cell service in Los Olivos is limited, that there is no ATM in town, and that the day can turn windy or sunny. The festival goes on rain or shine.

From 1 to 4 p.m. the Los Olivos Wine Festival is held in the gardens of St. Mark’s-in-the-Valley. More than 20 Los Olivos wineries pour there, with live music and a souvenir glass. Tickets are sold only to those 21 and over. The chamber started the tasting about two years before the 2026 edition, which it bills as the third.

Pumpkin and nothing else

The pie contest is also in its third year in 2026. It is open to home bakers living in the Santa Ynez Valley. The 2025 contest was for apple pie. The 2026 rules call for pumpkin only: 100 percent pumpkin, crust and filling made from scratch, and no canned filling or store-bought shells. Bakers check their pies in at The Grange on Alamo Pintado Avenue. Judging begins at 10 a.m. in Lavinia Campbell Park, while the parade is moving down Grand.

Judges score each pie on appearance (15 points) and creativity (10 points) before it is cut. After slicing they score the crust for 20 points, the filling for 25 and the flavor for 30. Winners are announced when the parade ends, with prizes of $75, $50 and $25. Every entrant is asked to give their pie for a public tasting afterward.

A cow on a cowboy

The parade has run along the same lines for years. The Santa Ynez Valley News described the October 15, 2016 edition with dance troupes, vintage cars and trucks, and riders on horseback. “A comical favorite,” the paper wrote, “was one rider who dressed herself as a cow and her horse as a cowboy.” The grand marshal was Jim Pugh, who had spent 25 years as keyboardist with The Robert Cray Band and then ran a nonprofit record label. Vendors sold arts and crafts, jewelry and clothing. There was a pancake breakfast, and aebleskivers, Danish pancakes, were for sale. The Crooked Path Band played.

The paper called that the 37th Day in the Country. It described the event as an annual fundraiser for the Los Olivos Business Organization, whose proceeds paid for beautification, public restrooms, and upkeep of the streets and the downtown flagpole. The Lompoc Record gave the same number, 37th, to the 2017 festival, which was held on October 21 and organized by the Los Olivos Chamber of Commerce.

For 2017 the paper counted about 1,100 people in town, and organizers expected 3,000 to 4,000 visitors. The volunteer event manager was Amy Freedman, co-owner of Stafford’s Chocolates. “It’s a big family day,” she said. “We start out with a family fun run and kids get to run in the country.” That year the members of Lucky Clover 4-H served a burrito breakfast at the Grange Hall in place of the usual pancakes, and dogs were welcome in the runs. A new “Wine Roundup” let adults buy a $25 pass good for up to 18 wines from nine of 17 wineries. Figueroa Mountain Brewing Co. ran a beer garden, and the Los Olivos Rotary sold tri-tip sandwiches.

At the north end of town, a Kiddie Korral at Saarloos Park offered kiddie steer roping, old-fashioned yard games and face painting. Beside it stood a giant lemon selling “Cup of Happiness” lemonade. The stand’s founder, Grant Sanregret, started it to support the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation after his son was diagnosed with the disease. A silent auction offered Nashville music memorabilia.

Freedman explained the tractors: “Many of the locals have old, vintage tractors. Many of the tractors are family owned and they’re prized possessions.” The 2017 grand marshals were Jim Lohnas, a retired commercial real estate consultant, and his wife Puck Erickson-Lohnas, a landscape architect. They were chosen for decades of volunteer work in town. Puck recalled the alley where her sons had built dirt-bike jumps, which local children still used. “They’re allowed to grow up the way kids are supposed to grow up,” she said. Asked about thousands of visitors coming into the small town, she answered: “The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned.”

The October 2023 festival had more than 100 vendor booths, roping lessons, a scarecrow competition around downtown, and live music at Figueroa Mountain Brewing’s wine and beer garden. Thousands filled Alamo Pintado and Grand. In the Santa Ynez Valley News staff report, parade entrants rolled through downtown “on horses, in vehicles — including tractors — and on foot,” turning out “as a way to honor the past.”

Five thousand olive trees

That past begins with the stagecoach. In 1861 the Overland / Coast Line Stage set up a station at Ballard, just south of present-day Los Olivos. In 1885 Alden March Boyd, 22 years old and from Albany, New York, paid $8,000 for about 157 acres on a bluff above Alamo Pintado Creek. He built a two-story house, planted 5,000 olive trees, and named the place Rancho de los Olivos.

On November 16, 1887, the Pacific Coast Railway finished its narrow-gauge extension from Los Alamos into the new town. The developers called the town “El Olivar,” then “El Olivos,” and finally “Los Olivos,” after Boyd’s ranch. Chinese workers were hired to level the streets. A land-company map drew a “Courthouse Block” for the expected county center. The railroad’s Hotel Los Olivos opened on May 1, 1888, burned in January 1890, and was never rebuilt.

Felix Mattei had bought land beside the station and finished his Central Hotel in 1886. After the railroad’s hotel burned, he took over the name Hotel Los Olivos, but people called it Mattei’s Tavern. It still takes guests as The Inn at Mattei’s Tavern.

The Boyd ranch was sold in 1988. The old farmhouse was moved in two pieces to the corner of Nojoqui and Alamo Pintado Avenues, across from St. Mark’s-in-the-Valley, where the wine festival now pours. The house has a wide covered porch, arched windows in the center gable and door knobs set curiously low, and it now holds offices. Boyd’s daughter Joan, quoted in William Etling’s Sideways in Neverland, remembered “the long hot summer days, lying in the hammock on the veranda and listening to the bells on the grain wagon teams as they went by on the road below our hill, lost in a cloud of dust.”