Marysville Peach Festival

On the third weekend of July, D Street in downtown Marysville fills with peaches between 3rd and 7th streets. There is peach ice cream, peach tea, chocolate-covered peaches, cobbler and pie. The festival requires every food vendor to serve at least one peach-flavored item, and a cook cannot meet the rule with a peach drink alone. More than 185 vendor spaces line the historic shopping district. The organizers put the crowd at more than thirty thousand. Admission and parking are free.

Six blocks of D Street

The 2026 festival, the 26th, ran Friday, July 17, from 4 to 10 p.m. and Saturday, July 18, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Area bands played two stages: the Main Stage on D Street north of 7th, and the South Stage on D Street north of 3rd. A children’s area stood among the booths. The organizers had forecast sunny skies and 94 degrees both days, “the coolest temps in the past five years.” The Appeal-Democrat reported near-100-degree heat on Saturday. Visitors ducked into restaurants in what the festival calls a Gold Rush era town, and the downtown bars poured icy peach cocktails.

The 2026 exhibitor roll ran from orchards to lumpia, musubi, oysters, pupusas, churros, kettle corn, sourdough and a Portuguese bakery. Marysville’s firemen and police officers each had a booth, as did the Girl Scouts. The Yuba County Democratic Central Committee and the Yuba County Republicans both took space on the same street. The festival’s home page names the fruit’s types as Cling, Freestone and Donut, and counts it among Yuba-Sutter’s top 10 commodities.

The 27th festival is set for July 16 and 17, 2027.

Fay Elbertas and Old Honeys

At the Sodaro Orchards booth, owner Sara Sodaro-Baggett sells the Fay Elberta. “It’s a high-demand fruit,” she told the Appeal-Democrat in 2026. “It’s an old variety of peach, soft and fleshy, a table fruit. We get calls for it before the season even starts.” Then she laughed: “Peaches are just like people – you like your blondes, you like your brunettes.” For 2026 the family made 1,800 cobblers and cut every peach by hand. A display at the booth holds photographs spanning five generations. In 2019 Alyssa Baggett worked the booth, weighing peaches and passing out cobbler. She ate peaches nearly every morning of the season and said, “I can’t smell them anymore.”

Amar and Joyti Baria have owned Baria Farms for 20 years. In 2026 they set out five kinds of peaches and four kinds of plums before the gates opened at 10 a.m. Their steady seller is the Old Honey, also called the Honey-Baked Peach. “They’re flavorful, not soft, not crunchy,” Joyti Baria said. Their son Sher, eight, came along to help.

Farther up the street, Pastor Antoinette Miles of Bethel African Methodist Church sold peach cobbler and fried chicken with church trustees Geno and Ronda Dorsey. Ronda Dorsey called the festival an “abundance of everything.” She added, “There’s more people here than last year.” Geno Dorsey put it plainly: “The COVID was rough. People still need to get out, and this is part of that.”

The shops behind the booths join in. In 2019 Doug Zwolski stocked the Candy Box with peach ice cream, cobbler made from Sodaro peaches, chocolate-covered frozen peaches and chocolate-covered peach Twizzlers. “For us as a candy store, we like to be the one that has the most peach stuff,” he said. That October the store marked its 65th year. In 2026 Sarai Gonzales, co-owner of Quenchies & Munchies on D Street, rang up smashed lemonade at a steady pace. City Manager Jim Schaad said of the festival, “One of the main intents is to spur business and this event seems to have done that.”

Four pounds, eleven ounces of pie

The peach pie eating contest starts at noon on Saturday. Entry is free and limited to the first 20 people, and each pie weighs about 4 pounds 11 ounces. For 2026 the festival’s schedule page put the contest at 6th and D; its home page said 3rd and D. The contest was staged beside a giant inflatable peach, and the Appeal-Democrat counted nearly two dozen contestants.

Paco Garcia, from “somewhere in Plumas County,” wiped his face afterward. “I was nervous but I’m like, ‘It’s free pie. What’s better than that?’” Celerity Schrader of Roseville said, “I like free stuff. I like pie. I like attention.” Miles-Tyson Blocker, an Air Force lieutenant colonel from Vacaville, reviewed his technique: “It’s more about speed than volume.”

From Nebraska to Highway 70

The Sodaro family began with a fruit stand in Nebraska in the 1930s. The family then moved west and opened another stand where the Sunnyvale City Hall now stands. In 1960 they bought 120 acres of almond and peach trees north of Marysville on Highway 70 and opened the stand that Sara Baggett was running in 2010. By then the holding was down to 11 acres and the stand. Her parents, Jody and John Sodaro, had sold the property to her and her husband, rice farmer Josh Baggett, about three years earlier and moved to Discovery Bay.

Photographs at the stand show Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004 with the family’s 1953 GMC pickup. According to Josh Baggett, the governor’s security detail never approved the driving, but once Schwarzenegger saw the truck he could not be talked out of it. Sara Baggett watched her father teach him to drive it in a parking lot behind a Sacramento motel. The governor then drove the fruit-laden truck around the state Capitol in a parade for California agriculture. “But the brakes were a little touchy,” she said. “He stepped on ‘em, and fruit went flying.”

A dinner table and a city

The sources tell the founding differently. The festival’s own site says the City of Marysville held the first festival in 1999 to celebrate the peach. In 2010 the Appeal-Democrat wrote that Jody Sodaro “cobbled together” the first festival eleven years earlier with help from her family, including Sara. The paper counted 2019 as the 20th anniversary, and that year Alyssa Baggett said her grandparents founded it. In 2026 the same paper dated the festival’s start to 2000 and wrote that it began as an idea from Sara Sodaro-Baggett’s grandmother. KCRA’s 2026 account traced it to a conversation at the family dinner table. Sara Baggett said her mother remembered an old peach festival that had once existed in Marysville and suggested bringing it back. The family took the idea to the city, and the festival began as a three-day event. “This business has gone through five generations of my family,” Sodaro-Baggett said in 2026. “We started the Peach Fest.”

KCRA reported that she has helped since she was about 8 years old. In 2010, at 34, she made 800 cobblers for the festival from the old Sodaro recipe. “It’s great because it’s so easy,” she said, “a cup of everything, and a stick of butter.” Friends and family came by all week to prep. On Thursday night the kitchen at the Marysville Elks Lodge became, in the paper’s words, cobbler central. Shannon Jacobsen, the city’s events coordinator and once the Sodaros’ baby sitter, ran the festival that year. Police Chief Wally Fullerton spent Tuesday running festival errands between his regular duties. “The world revolves around peaches at this time of year, even for me,” he said. New that year were a water slide, a roller coaster, deep-fried peach pie and deep-fried Coca-Cola, which drew shrugs at festival headquarters. The festival is now run through Sapphire Marketing Group of Yuba City.

The cobbler at the Sodaro booth is still made from the recipe of Sara Baggett’s grandmother, Carmela. After Carmela died, the family began printing her recipe to share with the community.