Patterson Apricot Fiesta

At the middle of downtown Patterson, in Stanislaus County, stands the Center Building. It was finished in 1910 as the sales office of the Patterson Ranch Company and now houses the museum of the Patterson Township Historical Society. The street that rings it is Plaza Circle. On the weekend following Memorial Day, the circle becomes the hub of the Patterson Apricot Fiesta. The program runs from a Friday-night pageant through a Saturday parade and fireworks to a Sunday of contests, with three days of food booths, bands and craft tables. The fiesta is run by the Apricot Fiesta Board of Directors and volunteers who work without pay. The 55th fiesta is set for June 4th through 6th, 2027.

Saturday on the circle

The parade route closes to traffic at about 8:00 a.m., and the parade steps off at 10. It forms at West Las Palmas Avenue and 7th Street and runs east on West Las Palmas to Plaza Circle. It goes around the circle to North 3rd Street and continues north to K Street. The announcer and judges sit at the main stage on the circle. In 2026, the Patterson Irrigator reported, thousands lined the streets to watch bands, floats, equestrian groups, elected representatives and businesses go by. The winners that year:

• Best Float: Modesto Junior College
• Hometown Spirit: the West Stanislaus Fire Department
• Best Novelty: Alvaro Rocha’s Bumblebee Transformer
• Best Marching Band: the Patterson High School Marching Band
• Best Overall Band: Jessica Castillo and Enedina Rincon with Banda Rancho Alegre
• Grand Equestrian Sweepstakes: the Merced County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse

Each year the parade includes machines from the Barnstormers, an offshoot of the historical society that restores farm equipment donated by local farmers. Their 2026 theme was manufacturers. Allis-Chalmers and Case tractors stood beside John Deere, which the Irrigator noted was the only one of the makers still in existence. One forklift, which the paper dated to 1930, had started out as a car and been changed by its original owner. It was driven in the parade. After the parade the equipment lines West Las Palmas Avenue for an antique farm show, and the museum opens a historical display on the plaza. Ken Herger, president of the Barnstormers, drove a tractor in the first fiesta parade in 1971, when he was in seventh grade. The Barnstormers, he told the Irrigator, “want to show what it used to be and what it’s gonna be.”

The rest of Saturday spreads out from the circle:

• Food booths fill South Park, with a beer and wine avenue alongside.
• North Park holds children’s games and a teen zone.
• Craft and commercial vendors take the downtown streets, and amusement rides run.
• Arm wrestlers weigh in on Las Palmas between the parks at 9 a.m. and compete at 1 p.m.
• A pickleball tournament, new in 2026, plays on North 3rd Street through the afternoon.
• A youth talent showcase runs at Tri Counties Bank.
• Bands play the Circle Stage from the end of the parade until 8 p.m. In 2026 they were DeVozion, Thunder Road and the California Outlaws.

At sundown fireworks go up over West Las Palmas Avenue and Ninth Street. The West Stanislaus fire district placed the launch in the field across from the Hammon Senior Center and the start at “usually around 9-ish p.m.” Part of the cost comes from the fiesta’s own Fourth of July fireworks stand on Sperry Avenue, between the strawberry stand and the Flying J. Every purchase there goes toward the next year’s display.

Pageants, pie and a firemen’s muster

The weekend opens Friday evening on the Circle Stage. The Little Mister and Little Miss Apricot contest starts at 6 and the Miss Patterson Pageant at 8. In 2026 Sophia Vannatta was crowned Miss Patterson. Megan Brooks and Annalisa White were the runners-up, and Isabel Torres was named Miss Congeniality. Haven Fullerton and Parker Thorkelson took the small crowns. The court rides in Saturday’s parade and represents the city at events through the following year.

Sunday starts with breakfast in North Park from 7:30 a.m. In 2026 First Baptist Church also led live worship in the downtown circle. The J. Schali Hay Games begin at 11 on North 3rd Street. At 2 p.m. the apricot pie eating contest takes the Circle Stage, and the Shakedown Party Band closes the stage afterward. Scout Troop 81 sells apricot ice cream.

At the firemen’s muster, local fire departments compete against one another in drills. At the 2026 muster:

• First overall: probationary firefighters of the West Stanislaus County Fire Protection District, who also won the bucket brigade
• Second: the Turlock Rural Fire Protection District, which won the water ball
• Third: Cal Fire’s Del Puerto crew, which took the turnout drill

Denair sent a team as well.

The bake contest is held the Saturday before the fiesta. It accepts only recipes containing apricots, and only from Patterson residents. The 2026 grand prize went to Elianna Lopez Contreras for an apricot cheesecake, over entries that included apricot flan and apricot candy lemonade. Student and resident art, judged and ribboned in advance, hangs in City Hall’s council chambers through the weekend.

Rain and cold had threatened the 2026 weekend, the Irrigator reported, but the weather turned out decent. At 10:38 p.m. on Sunday, the fiesta posted on Facebook that it was a wrap.

Western Daze, 1971

The founding story comes from Ron Swift, who wrote it in 2012; the Irrigator reprinted it in 2022. In the spring of 1971 Patterson had two business groups: the Patterson-Westley Chamber of Commerce and the Patterson Business Association, which concentrated on downtown. Business was good after a slump in the 1960s, and housing was nearly impossible to find. The association’s board planned a week of events just before the Fourth of July. The aim was to draw residents downtown and let service clubs, churches and youth groups earn money by staging the activities. The plan called for a queen contest, maybe a bake-off for the women and a “whiskerino” contest for the men, horseshoes and a parade.

Someone proposed a Western theme, with hats and boots for men and long dresses for women. “Maybe it wasn’t the best idea for 100-degree-in-the-shade weather,” Swift wrote. The directors divided the work. Jerry Musson took the parade and Al Gibbens the queen pageant. Hank Wong chaired a chicken barbecue whose profits would go to a new football stadium that Patterson High supporters were building that same spring.

The organizers decided they needed a better theme than Western Daze. Then, in Swift’s telling, came a suggestion “from out of the blue: ‘Why not call it an Apricot Fiesta?’” They held out for fiesta over festival: “Heck, every town has a festival.” The Chamber of Commerce agreed to decree Patterson the Apricot Capital of the World. Swift allowed that it may have been at the time. California grew 95 percent of the nation’s apricots, and the Patterson-Westley area grew more than 40 percent of California’s. Claude Delphia of the Irrigator staff hand-designed the Apricot Capital emblem, which Swift said was still in use.

With about three weeks to go, money ran short. Mate and Dorothy Candrlich, apricot growers, gave $1,000 against expenses of more than $3,000. The half-dozen organizers met every day at 5 p.m. at the newspaper office. Every few days they sent one-page newsletters to 150 to 200 active residents and asked them to pass the word along. The newsletters were printed on paper and delivered by hand.

The Thursday-through-Saturday program drew large crowds. After the Friday-night Miss Apricot pageant in the downtown park, the organizers decided to turn the pageant stage into a parade float. Domingos Farinha Jr. led a small crew that worked most of the night on the conversion, and the float went down the street late Saturday morning.

The move to Memorial Day weekend

The 1972 fiesta hit 108 degrees, and much of the crowd went home by mid-afternoon. Early on, the fiesta incorporated, with dues of $1 a year, and it soon had more than 400 members. It ran in the red its first two years. In 1973 it moved about four weeks earlier, to the weekend following Memorial Day, for cooler weather and more school participation, and it finished in the black.

That year the board went to Sacramento to invite Gov. Ronald Reagan. They gave him a basket of apricot products. He kept them in his office 45 minutes instead of the five planned for the photo and asked plenty of questions about apricots. He had, he said, one ‘cot tree on his ranch in Southern California. The fiesta also had a guest appearance by the Prince of Hunza, a college student in Southern California whose homeland in northern Pakistan grows and eats plenty of apricots.

The board weighed two ways to raise money. One was an advance ticket booklet for events such as the queen pageant. The other was a fence around all of downtown with an admission fee for everyone. It dropped both. Instead it started a craft fair, renting booths and collecting vendor and beverage fees. The fiesta, Swift wrote, has traditionally had no admission charge.