Pioneer Days Celebration

At six in the morning on July 24, runners collect their bib numbers at Monroe City Lions Park, at the southwest corner of Main Street and 100 North, where the Monroe Town Bell stands. Registration closes at 6:45. At seven the children leave on a one-mile run, open to ages one through twelve. At about 7:20 comes a sprint of a single block, 178 meters, with no prizes except shirts for the quickest man and the quickest woman. At 7:30 the five-mile and 5K fields start together. Every race ends at the park where it began.

The Milk Run on the morning of the 24th

The South Sevier High School track and field team hosts the run, and the proceeds go to the team. Its director is Jill Anderson, the school’s head track coach. The 2026 race, held Friday, July 24, 2026, was the 40th annual running of the five-mile course. The race page says the run took its name forty years earlier from its original route, which passed seven dairies between start and finish. The page says the race still honors farming, the dairies, and the old creamery on North Main Street, which played a large part in Monroe’s early history. The five-mile course still runs through farm fields, though most of the dairies have retired. The 5K winds through the southern part of town. The block sprint was run for the second year in 2026. That year’s registration list showed 119 runners in the 5K, 48 in the kids’ mile, 23 in the five-mile, and 3 in the sprint.

Three days on Main Street

Monroe City runs the celebration, and the city’s page sets it over July 22, 23 and 24. On the evening of the 23rd, from six to eight, a barbecue is held at Lions Park, and runners can pick up their bibs there for the next morning. The city also takes float entries for its Pioneer Days parade and registers vendor booths for the celebration.

A children’s parade is held on Friday evening. Some of the children go from the parade to the basketball courts. The Midnight Madness 3 on 3 Hoop Challenge is a fundraiser for the South Sevier High School boys’ basketball team, played in conjunction with the city’s 24th of July celebration. It has ten divisions. The youngest is for boys and girls in third grade and under, and the oldest is for men thirty and older, with open divisions for graduates. Coach Christensen and Coach Stevenett are the contacts. The organizers’ page for 2027 puts divisions one through five on Thursday, July 22, with check-in at five o’clock. Divisions six through ten play on Friday, July 23, with check-in at 6:15, after the children’s parade.

The 24th ends with a professional fireworks display, set off by trained and certified firefighters. In June 2026, Governor Spencer Cox asked Utahns to avoid personal fireworks because of extremely dry conditions across the state. The Monroe City Council and the Monroe City Fire Department did not ban them. They wrote to residents that the fire department and the Sevier County Sheriff’s Office answer several fireworks fires every year around Independence Day and Pioneer Day. They asked residents and visitors to watch the displays on July 4 and July 24 and to “consider taking a year off from using personal fireworks.”

South Bend, Alma, Monroe

July 24 is an official state holiday in Utah. The Utah Historical Society records that the first company of Latter-day Saint pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley between July 21 and 24, 1847, when the valley was still part of Mexico. The settlers first marked the day on July 24, 1849, with celebratory gunfire, music, patriotic speeches, and a reading of the Declaration of Independence. An afternoon meal was shared by the settlers, local Native Americans, and gold miners passing through on their way to California.

Monroe was settled fifteen years after that first holiday. Jacob Barlow’s history of the town says a few exploratory settlers arrived in late 1863, followed by the first permanent group in February 1864. The town was first called South Bend, for a nearby bend in the Sevier River. It was soon renamed Alma, after the Book of Mormon prophet. Barlow estimates that about 20 families were living there by the end of 1864. The town history kept by Sevier County Archives and Heritage Services gives a different count. It says Brigham Young sent 32 families in 1864, and that they found a wide stretch of sagebrush, a generous stream from the main canyon, cottonwoods and willows, small animals, and deer. The Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area says a small Mormon civilian company of men established the place to build a fort for protection.

Barlow lists the families of Fort Alma between 1864 and 1867, among them the Allreds, Barneys, Christensens, Giffords, Stevenses, and George Swindle. They spent the first year building small homes and dugouts and clearing ground for fields and pastures. In April 1865 the Black Hawk War broke out between local Native Americans and the settlers of Sevier and Sanpete counties, and it ended the work of making farms around Alma. Some settlers left. When they returned in 1871, they renamed the town Monroe, after President James Monroe, according to the heritage area. The county history says the town was built almost entirely from the rock, lime, clay, and timber of the surrounding valley. It grew to support farms, dairies, small businesses, churches, and schools.

A log cabin moved twice

During the winter of 1866–1867, William Cordingly built a small log cabin in Alma, and it was ready for his family by early spring. The family of Neila Mickelson was among the first to live in it, followed by the Soren and Kristine Madsen family. Sunday School and choir practice were held there, along with many public functions.

In 1931, Camp Alma of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers decided to acquire the cabin for a relic hall. Dwight Swindle, on whose lot it stood, gave it to them. In 1937 the members’ husbands and other townspeople jacked the cabin up and moved it to the northeast corner of the Monroe North Ward property. By then it had no roof, floor, windows, or foundation. The members sewed and wove twelve large balls of rags into a rag carpet. They lined the walls, covered the ceiling with White Factory cloth, and painted the inside. Townspeople gave relics to furnish it, and Camp Alma held its first meeting in the Relic Hall on May 27, 1938. The cabin now carries Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker No. 468. On July 23, 1950, the cabin was moved again, to its present site on Main Street.