Florence Pioneer Days

The parade on Florence’s Main Street steps off at 10 a.m. on the Saturday of the third weekend in September. “Every year, people line the streets for the parade well before it starts,” organizer Rich Burleson told the Cañon City Daily Record in 2019. “There’s always a big turnout.” The 2026 parade, the 98th, ran on September 19 with more than 50 entries under the theme “Celebrate Florence Heritage.”

The 2019 parade was larger, with 91 entries, and was expected to last about an hour and a half. A flyover opened it. Behind the king and queen came former Denver Broncos riding in Corvettes, floats, elementary schools, city council candidates, Shriners, the Pikes Peak Corvair Club, ATV clubs, churches, and the Legendary Longhorns. “The last entry is Santa Claus,” Burleson said. In 2024 the route ran west to east, and the lineup included the Howling Husky Pride Band, the Fountain/Fort Carson High School Band, the Apple Day royalty from Penrose, and Anita McCoy’s Americanettes. Each year has a theme. For “Bars and Brothels” in 2019, Burleson said, merchants decorated their storefronts and windows to suit it.

Royalty at the Elks

The weekend opens the evening before at the Florence Elks Club, where the Pioneer Day royalty is crowned at 6:30 p.m. The court is a king and queen, a Distinguished Citizen, and a Parade Marshal. A dance follows, open to the whole town. In 2024 the Atomic Fire Balls played it at the Elks Lodge, 131 E. Front St.

The Pioneer Board picks the court from among longtime residents. For 2026 it chose Dean and Jenny MacKinnon. Both graduated from Florence High School. He served in the Army from 1964 to 1967, and she served in the Navy from 1966 to 1969. Both volunteer at the Florence Pioneer Museum, and together they have restored a 1929 Model A and the 1957 Chevy Dean owned in high school. Jenny said she misunderstood the invitation at first, thinking she was being asked to work a booth or represent the museum. “I was working a booth at the Farmers Market and Joann Mohr asked ‘what do you think about being king and queen,’” she said. “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I had no idea.” Dean said, “It was beyond my mind to be in that spot.”

The 2026 Distinguished Citizen was Dick Carochi. He was a retired coach and assistant principal who once cooked for Pioneer Day with the late Florence Chamber executive director Darrell Lindsay. “I’d like people to know we’ve been happily married 65 years,” Carochi said. Paul Villagrana served as Parade Marshal. The Distinguished Veteran Service Award went to Royal Schmidt, a 102-year-old World War II veteran. Earlier courts followed the same pattern. In 2023 the king and queen were Jim and Kathy Carochi. In 2024 they were Joe and Mary Baca, and Joe is a Korean War veteran who worked as a Florence city dispatcher. That year the Distinguished Citizen was Burleson himself, honored for more than 36 years with the celebration as president and parade master. In 2025 the king and queen were Tom and Judy McCormick.

The park after the parade

When the parade ends, the crowd moves to Pioneer Park, the town’s downtown activity space at Pikes Peak and Petroleum between East Third and East Fourth streets. The festival there begins at 11 a.m. The 2026 program had food trucks, live music, vendors, and gold panning for children. In 2024 it had a cornhole tournament, a veterans’ museum, and possibly a mechanical bull. “You’ll have to find out for yourself,” the Daily Record reported.

The center of the park day is the Pioneer BBQ, a meal served to the town’s pioneers. Guests register at the covered eating area on the north side of the park. Big D’s Superfoods supplied the 2026 meal. The same grocer ran the 2019 “Sink the Sub” contest, in which entrants raced to eat a sandwich weighing more than two pounds. That year the morning began at 8 a.m. with biscuits and gravy from the Penrose VFW.

Other events spread beyond the park. In 2026 the Rotary Clubs of Florence and Cañon City held their duck derby at Pioneer Day after the Aspen Acres Fire forced cancellation of the Fourth of July festival, where it was first scheduled. The top ten ducks paid $50 to $1,000. The Bell Tower Cultural Center at 201 E. Second St. hung a Western Art Show. The Arkansas Valley Flywheelers ran tractor pulls at the Pathfinder Park Event Center, just west along Colo. 115. “There aren’t exactly official times so plan to show up and enjoy the tractor pulls,” board member Rudl Mergelman said in 2024.

A picnic of fifteen or twenty

According to a 2020 account from the Florence Pioneer Museum, the gatherings began in 1882. That year pioneers of eastern Fremont County met to tell stories of their journey and their trials, sing, and eat, “with everyone drinking from the same cup.” The organized celebration came later, and the sources disagree on the year. Board president Virginia Rankin’s 2011 account, as reported by the Daily Record, dates it to 1927. It began that year as a Women’s Club picnic attended by 15 to 20 residents, in and across from the present site of Pioneer Park. The museum’s account also gives 1927 and says the Florence Women’s Club fixed the third Saturday in September as the day to honor the pioneers. Burleson gave a different date in 2019: “The Pioneer Day celebration began in 1928 by the Federated Women’s Club of Florence.” He said the club ran it for 15 years and then handed it to the Florence Pioneer Day Association, “which has organized the event ever since.” A Fremont County heritage tour booklet uses a photograph of the parade from the early 1940s on its cover, courtesy of the Donnie James family.

The program has changed over the decades. Past years included a beard contest and, in the 1950s, a Miss Pioneer Day contest. In the 1960s and 1970s the kings and queens were crowned at the Rialto Theater, with melodramas by the Red Brick Players. Dances were once held in the parking lot across from the Rocky Mountain Bank and Trust before moving to the Elks, where meals were added. There were 5K and 10K races at one time, and bicycle races on the Sunday after. The board also honored the town’s oldest woman and oldest man.

Rankin described the finances to the city council in 2011. “Everything is donated,” she said. “We do not have any ways and means projects whatsoever.” The board’s only income was the $10 that nonprofits paid for booths in the park. That year it spent $1,186 on food to feed the pioneers and $135 on a photograph of the kings and queens. “We have had as many as 2,000 people in Pioneer Park,” she said. She added that class reunions come in for the day: “They look forward to Pioneer Day and they want to come back to see everybody.”

A museum and an oil marker

The association’s work has gone beyond the parade. In 1962 it joined the State Historical Society of Colorado in erecting the “Oldest Oil Field In The West” marker on West Third Street near City Hall. In the same years, board member Charles Price wanted a museum. According to the museum, the board told him it would sponsor the project if he would produce it. Price and fellow board member Darrell Lindsey raised money through a “100 for $15” Club and collected the $1,500 needed to buy the old Eagles Lodge building at Pikes Peak Avenue and Front Street. Volunteers worked through the summer of 1964 to ready it, and Lindsey fell off the scaffold while painting the ceiling. Velma “Toni” Price catalogued the donations. The Florence Pioneer Museum was dedicated on September 12, 1964. The building dates to 1894, and the original 1875 town jail stands in its back yard.

When the COVID-19 pandemic canceled Pioneer Day in 2020, the only break in the record, the museum held its own week of displays from September 15 to 19. It invited families to a coffee to identify unlabeled photographs. Among the pioneer stories it keeps is one from 1900, when a family was crossing a creek in their wagon and the baby fell out of her cradle. She married her rescuer in 1922.

The 2025 celebration was billed as “97 Years of Pioneers.” Its organizers added the phrase “Founders and Rounders” to recognize every kind of family: the founders, they wrote, “provided the straight and narrow,” and the rounders “provided the more interesting stories of Florence.”