Oregon Trail Days

At 10:45 on the Saturday morning of Oregon Trail Days, the Tenino Motorcycle Drill Team rolls onto Sussex Avenue to open the Tenino Lions Club Grand Parade. In 2026, South Thurston Fire & EMS took the lead at 11 o’clock, placed up front, the festival’s organizers wrote, “so they have quick access to leave if needed.” The Color Guard came next, then the family of Grand Marshal Ignatius Colvin escorting six covered wagons, then the Citizen of the Year, Frank Hicks. Chad Taylor and Eric Schwarts announced the parade again that year. Chronicle photographs of the 2025 parade show the drill team doing stunts, a man playing the bagpipes, the Tenino High School football and cheer teams riding a float, the Morton Loggers Jubilee Queen waving, and entries tossing food and handing out popsicles along the curb.

Hicks served six years in the United States Navy and more than thirty in the local VFW, first as Commander and later as Post Surgeon. Since 2015 he had pushed for a Veterans Memorial Honor Roll Wall, and the wall was unveiled the week before the 2026 festival. At the ceremony, the Tenino Area Chamber of Commerce wrote, some veterans “stood there, pointing at their name and having their photo taken with it.”

The chamber runs Oregon Trail Days. The 2026 festival, the 59th, ran July 24 through 26, mostly in Tenino City Park, with more events downtown. Cheryl Pearce, the chamber’s president, was co-chair. The festival’s page gives the next dates as July 23, 24, and 25, 2027.

Salmon, pie, and a fish to climb into

After the parade the crowd moves to the park, where the Quarry Pool opens from noon to six each day of the weekend. Near the pool in 2026, the Creekside Conservancy held its Traditional Salmon Bake, with salmon and sides prepared by the Chehalis Tribe and Lucky Eagle Casino. Tickets were $20, and the proceeds went to the conservancy’s work keeping habitat for local plants and animals. Shy’s Lunch Box, also by the pool, opened at nine with breakfast sandwiches. Other stands sold fried bread tacos, Filipino food from Pagkaing Ping, Italian ice, specialty hot dogs, Cuban fusion and cotton candy, and burgers from the Thurston County Democrats. The Tenino Farmers Market judged its Blue Ribbon Pie Contest at noon in four classes: berry, fruit, nut, and junior baker under sixteen. No cream pies were allowed. After the parade the market sold pie by the slice for $3.

FIN the Migrating Salmon lay near the entrance to the Quarry House, the pool, and the depot museum. FIN is a fiberglass fish 25 feet long, and visitors climb inside to find wildlife painted on the interior walls. Inside the Quarry House, Briar Cottage Quilting Fabrics and Notions hung more than 20 quilts. On the ball fields near the Blue Pump Track, the 32nd annual Rock & Gem Show set out 28 vendors of minerals, crystals, fossils, beads, and lapidary gear. Demonstrators showed how to make stone arrowheads, knives, beads, and cabochons, and the club ran its spinning wheel. Admission was free. The chamber names the host as the Washington Agate and Mineral Society, “the state’s oldest organized rock club.” The Chronicle’s printed schedule calls it the Willamette Agate & Mineral Society. The festival page thanked a member named Dan for 32 years as chair of the show.

The Tenino No. 564 Fraternal Order of Eagles ran a beer garden and an outdoor stage. Exit 88 Band played Friday night. On Saturday the stage had Shoot from the Hip Band, then Andra & Tarik, then the headliner, Ethan Tucker, until ten. A car and motorcycle show filled the afternoon, and the silent auction and raffles raised money to refinish the Eagles’ dance floor. At Tenino High School the Tenino Young-at-Heart Theatre played Once Upon a Mattress. At Parkside School the Capital City 3on3 basketball tournament held a dunk contest on Saturday and a three-point contest on Sunday. Gospel Sunday took the Quarry House Stage lawn, with Cornerstone Community Church at noon and Tenino Assembly of God at two. VFW Post 5878 closed the weekend with a flag ceremony at four.

Cider press, froe, and a $2 shot

Bob Hill has put on the Pioneer Village since 2009. The festival page says it takes more than 40 volunteers to staff. The chamber’s schedule counts 28 hands-on frontier activities. The 2026 news release said 30, and the chamber’s own description runs to thirty numbered entries. Visitors press apple cider and shave a limb into an axe handle with a drawknife. They dip candles and drive a froe into a cedar block to split off a shake. Two at a time, they pull a crosscut saw through a log. They straddle a log and chip it flat with a carpenter’s adze, and they scrub laundry on a board and crank it through a wringer. On a device a hundred years old, they twist three strands of twine into a rope to take home. There is also a mountain man rendezvous camp, Dutch oven samples, and a large grindstone worked by pedal.

The Black Powder Shooting Experience returned in 2026. Instructors demonstrated flintlock and percussion rifles of the kind carried by trappers, mountain men, and Oregon Trail emigrants. Then visitors fired one themselves, at $2 a shot. The rifles were loaded with blank charges, no bullets, which the organizers said still gave “all the real flash, thunder and cloud of smoke.” Pearce said, “One of the things people have told us most is that they missed the Black Powder Experience where kids could experience what it was like to fire a rifle.” On Friday, the festival page reported, many of the shooters were six to thirteen years old.

An 1890 press in the stone depot

The Tenino Depot Museum is a former train depot, a stone building listed on the National Register. On August 30, 1975, after the town spent two and a half years raising money to save it, the 322-ton depot was lifted in one piece and trucked 10 blocks to the city park. The contractor was paid with a wooden check for $30,000, nine by twenty-four inches.

During the festival the museum grounds fill up. In 2026, Otis the blacksmith worked at his forge, a restored Burlington Northern caboose stood open, and the Washington Civil War Association pitched an encampment. Wagons of the Cowlitz Trail Outdoor Museum stood “circled up” around the site. In the Ticknor Schoolhouse, a “Life at Grand Mound” program told of the Oregon Trail with maps, and trivia games filled the gaps between story sets. Indoors, a diorama showed a Native American longhouse beside a stream in the Chehalis Basin 250 years ago, and a display covered Colvin’s part in shaping the town.

The museum also holds an 1890 Chandler & Price printing press. It once printed the Tenino Independent. When the Great Depression struck and the Citizen’s Bank of Tenino failed, the Tenino Chamber of Commerce issued emergency scrip. According to Arthur Dwelley’s history, the first issue was on paper. The chamber then printed it on “slice wood” of spruce and cedar. “Eight issues were printed between 1932 and 1933 with a total of $10,308 of the wooden currency put into circulation,” Dwelley wrote. “It became a collector’s item, and only $40 was ever redeemed by the chamber.” Those bills have since sold for $75 to $4,000, according to Loren Ackerman.

Ackerman, president of the South Thurston County Historical Society, joined the museum in 1991. “By 1992, it was getting hard on the old-timers to run this machine, so they asked me to start running it and I’ve been running it ever since,” he told the Chronicle in 2025. He and his wife Shelli printed wooden money together for more than 30 years, until her death in 2024. Now he runs the press with his middle son, Tyler, and Tyler’s son. During the COVID-19 pandemic the Ackermans printed wooden scrip for residents, and some of it is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Of the press, Ackerman said, “We have an oiler, and we walk around and try to hit all 90 ports with a little drop of oil, and that keeps it going. For 135 years old, it runs beautifully.”

On Saturday of the 2026 festival, the press ran a limited batch of double-sided “Happy 250th Birthday America” bills at one o’clock, sold for $5 each. At two the museum introduced the student artist who won that year’s design contest for the festival’s wooden money. On Sunday at two there was cake.

Beards by order of the mayor

Tenino’s parades are older than the festival. In the early 1900s, men hauled a cannon to the top of Lemon Hill in the dark and fired it at sunrise to open the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July parade ran from about 1892 to 1913 by the best guess of local historian Jessica Reeves-Rush. It featured the Battle of Split Pea Soup, staged by the Tenino Home Guard, a comically disorganized company. Scott McArthur recorded his father’s memory of it: “short men carried long rifles and tall men carried short rifles.” Each time the cannon fired, a soldier fell. He was carried into a hospital tent where Doc Wichman performed a “field amputation,” and a fake limb flew out the back. After a pull on the communal whiskey bottle, the wounded man slipped out to rejoin his regiment. ThurstonTalk reported in 2017 that the cannon was on display at the depot museum.

The Eagles held their first Labor Day celebration in 1923. Roger Reeves, who grew up in Tenino, remembered the Labor Day weekends of the 1940s and 1950s as “a reunion weekend.” In 1967 the Eagles gave up hosting it. The Lions Club stepped in late that year, and there was no parade.

In 1968 the Tenino Independent published a proclamation from Mayor Kenneth E. Hedden. It ordered every male resident over 18 to stop shaving from August 3 through 25, on pain of the “Vigilante” committee and the “hoosegow.” Men “with ticklish spouses” could buy a “Beardless Permit” from Oregon Trail Days representatives for $2. Merchants and their clerks were to wear “old-time” dress, “in the interest of showing the world that we truly have ‘the pioneer spirit.’”

That first year brought a kids’ parade and a main parade, midway booths, a muzzle-loading rifle shoot, slo-pitch baseball, Indian dances, square dancing, a teen dance, and an old-time fiddlers’ contest. The City of Tenino says the name honors the town’s place in Oregon Trail history. By 2017 the festival had settled on the fourth weekend in July. In 1969 the chairman, Roger Reeves, was photographed in costume with his wife Marsha and their children, David and Jennifer. In 1968 the store owners on Sussex Street had dressed up too, and every shop set a historic display in its window.