Peach Days

Blankets on Main Street

On the Friday of Peach Days, blankets and chairs go down along Brigham City’s Main Street to hold places for the parade at ten the next morning. The 2026 festival ran Wednesday through Saturday, September 9 to 12, the weekend after Labor Day. The Box Elder Chamber of Commerce runs it from its building at 75 South Main Street, where carnival tickets sold at $10 for ten and $35 for an all-day wristband.

On Friday and Saturday more than 200 booths filled Main Street and the Community Center from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. They sold art, crafts, and imported goods, and food trucks parked among them. Fresh fruit stood on display downtown from Thursday through Saturday. Shop windows were dressed for the occasion and judged, and in 2026 the Boys & Girls Club of Northern Utah won the People’s Choice Award for its window. Downtown parking is short, so a shuttle ran on Saturday from the Utah State University Brigham City campus at 989 South Main.

Peaches from Idaho

In 2026 a spring freeze wiped out the local peach crop. “No peaches,” Cari Tagge, whom KSL identified as CEO of Brigham City Peach Days, told the station. “It was heartbreaking, but we’re crying inside because, like every farmer, things happen every summer, and we have to pivot and do something different.” Organizers turned north. “The good thing is that we have friends in Idaho who have our backs, and they’re giving us their peaches, and we’re bringing them down,” Tagge said.

Cache Valley Daily reported that, despite the late freeze, Tagge’s Fruit and Veggie Farms kept a stand at the corner of Main and Forest streets. It sold fresh, hand-picked peaches along with peach jam, peach salsa, and other peach specialties. The paper called the weekend the busiest time of year for the fruit stands along the highway.

The sources give different crowd counts. Cache Valley Daily said more than 35,000 visitors generally attend. A 2024 Utah Humanities piece put the figure at some 40,000, enough to double the town’s population. Katia Holdway, an office aide with the chamber, told KSL in 2026: “We get almost 70,000 people in town during Peach Days.”

Four days of program

The 2026 schedule opened on Wednesday with the Junior Peach Queen Pageant at the Brigham Academy Center, 58 North Main Street. That night was also the first performance of the melodrama “The Secret of Briggs Hall” at the Fine Arts Center, 58 South 100 West, which played again Thursday, Friday, and twice on Saturday. On Thursday evening the Peach Queen Pageant, which the chamber also billed as the Peach Queen Scholarship Contest, took the stage at Box Elder High School. Quilts hung all three days at the USU campus, where Jill Finley of Jillilly Quilts gave a trunk show on Friday afternoon. Across town, the Brigham City Museum hung its 56th annual quilt show, Broad Spectrum IV: Evolutions, at 24 North 300 West. The library held a used-book sale, and the Capitol Theatre at 53 South Main hosted a presentation on historic homes.

Friday evening the City of Fun Carnival opened on Forest Street. It had a merry-go-round for children and, as Cache Valley Daily put it, “more aggressive rides” for teenagers. At 6 p.m. the Community Kick Off Parade came down Main from 200 South to 300 North. Children’s activities were free under the Main Street Arch, and at 7:30 The Saltairs, The Boy in Blue, and Last Wild Buffalo played a free concert on the Main Street Stage beside the Academy Center.

Saturday began at 8 a.m. with a 10K road race from the Main Street Stage. At ten the main parade ran up Main from 300 South to 600 North. Tate Kessler, the junior grand marshal, rode in both parades. The free car show filled Watkins and Pioneer parks on West Forest Street from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It was limited to the first 1,000 cars, and the chamber calls it the largest in the state. From one o’clock, Harleys and custom bikes lined Main Street under the arch while the Ruff House Band played. Beside them the beard contest was judged, at $10 a category, with the proceeds going to the Box Elder County Children’s Justice Center. Through the afternoon the Main Street Stage presented Courtney Vel Voice Studio, Lincoln Checketts, the Ori Tahiti Syracuse Dance Group, Tutulli Ballet Folklorica, and the Hinge Point Sisters. Cornhole bags flew at Pioneer Park at 5:30. At 7:30 Maddie Wilson closed the night with the free Saturday concert. Cache Valley Daily described her as a country-pop singer-songwriter and YouTuber who takes pop songs and gives them a country flair.

A dollar’s worth of pits

The festival’s own account begins in 1855. That year, according to Utah Humanities, William Wrighton took Brigham Young’s advice to grow fruit trees in Brigham City and bought 100 peach pits for $1. The trees did well in the town’s warm days and cool evenings. Within three years Wrighton was harvesting peaches, and others followed him. By the turn of the century, train cars full of peaches left Brigham City weekly for towns around Utah, and nurseries, canneries, and produce shippers grew up around the orchards.

The Utah Statesman tells it this way: in 1904 Brigham farmers had perfect weather and an excellent peach crop, and community leaders decided to celebrate the harvest on the first Friday and Saturday of every September. Utah Humanities describes that first Peach Days as successful but modest, with fruit displays and a few other activities on the courthouse lawn. The next year the Box Elder Commercial Club took it on. The club offered concessions, held a parade, and advertised in newspapers and on billboards, promoting Brigham City as a place to live as well as a place to buy peaches.

The single day grew to several. Over the years it added fireworks, dancing, beauty contests, free peaches, and a parade of fancy floats. A 1956 photograph in the Brigham City Museum of Art & History shows one of those floats. Local businesses and schools built them to carry children, local celebrities, and the Peach Queen. Utah Humanities calls Peach Days the oldest harvest festival in Utah.

The hundredth parade

The Statesman covered the centennial in September 2004. Five F-16s roared overhead, followed by the wail of eight fire trucks. A girl in a hula skirt spurred her cow down Main Street behind the barricades. The high school band marched past, and women in their sixties called out, “Huck some candy up here!” The parade ran two and a half hours with a little over 120 entries. Marchers threw saltwater taffy, Tootsie Rolls, coupons for free burgers, miniature boxes of Malt-O-Meal, golf balls, and T-shirts.

Ivy Buck of Brigham City had been crowned Peach Queen on Thursday. Monica Holdaway, then executive director and in 2026 named in the chamber’s posts as its CEO, said Peach Days “quadruples the small town’s population.” The Statesman put the crowd at 60,000 to 75,000. James Young, a freshman, said his favorite part was the Thai food: “Last year I spent like $30, just on Thai food.”

The 10K that year drew 240 runners aged eight to 80. Two miles in, Brett Lyman thrust his fist in the air and yelled, “Long live the peach!” Each finisher received a bottle of water and a Brigham City peach. Joanna Crowther, the first woman across the line, stood with bloody feet and a peach in one hand and said, “Yeah, it wasn’t too bad.”

That afternoon 250 Harleys stood chained beneath the “Welcome to Brigham City” arch, and spectators were not allowed to touch them. “Someday, when my kids are all grown up, my husband and I are going to travel the world on one of those,” said Mardi Shaw, lifting her youngest away from the bikes. An eight-year-old from Draper named Lexie Baxter won arm-wrestling match after match against boys aged seven to 12. At Maddox, the steak house, people waited 20 to 40 minutes for turkey steaks while a film on how beef is prepared played in the lobby. Ben Smith, a local resident, called the day “a big reunion for everyone who’s ever lived in Brigham City.”

Out on U.S. Highway 89 the fruit-stand lots filled, and cars parked along the highway. Heather Chambers of Perry had worked a stand for five years. “People screaming and saying they need to go, but the peaches just aren’t ready yet,” she said. “I’d like to see them pick some of those peaches themselves.”