Toledo Summer Festival & Logging Show

Memorial Field lies along NW A Street in Toledo, Oregon, between Industrial Way and NW 1st Street. For three days each July it holds a carnival, food vendors, an entertainment stage, and a set of logs for the Toledo Summer Festival & Logging Show, which bills itself as “over 100 years of family fun, fireworks, carnival and food.” The 2026 festival ran July 10 through 12. The carnival trucks rolled onto the field in the first days of that July, and the field stayed closed while they moved about.

Entry is by button. In 2026 a $10 button covered all three days, children five and under went in free, and the gate charged $8 a day if the buttons sold out. Members of the princess court sold them for weeks beforehand from a fireworks tent, from Dairy Queen and Do It Best, and from an A-frame building next to the car wash. The buttons were also on the counters at Milltown Coffee Stop, Cobblestone Pizza, Toledo Feed & Seed, JC Market, Les Schwab, Timbers, Coffee Depot and Oregon Coast Bank.

Friday on Main Street

The festival opens on Friday evening with the children’s parade. At 6 PM it leaves the Toledo Public Library and goes down Main Street to the south end, and the road closures begin before six. In 2026 the organizers asked people to “bring the family, wave to the kids, catch some candy.” Oregon Coast TODAY’s preview of an earlier year described children aged one to 12 in bright clothing, bringing bikes, dogs and favorite toys and walking in procession to Memorial Field, where the gates opened when they arrived. The same preview listed bingo, craft vendors and a beer garden on the field, the Magical Mr. B at 7 PM, and the Sol Fire Dancers at 9:30.

Friday of 2026 was billed as the Jon and Doreen Howry Entertainment Night. DOA Pro Wrestling went on at 7 PM, with fifteen VIP seats sold at $20 each, and a Pirate Logger Costume Contest followed at 9. The field closed at midnight.

Axes, saws and a Jack & Jill

Saturday is the long day. In 2026 it began with the Boyer Fun Run at 8 AM and the Grand Parade at 11. In the year Oregon Coast TODAY described, the Grand Parade started at Muggly’s Bowling and finished at the end of Main Street, where the festival gates opened. The court was introduced at 12:50 and the Logging Show began at 1 PM.

The Logging Show is for amateurs only. Patrick Alexander of Oregon Coast TODAY opened his preview this way: “Nothing quite says ‘summer in Toledo’ like a bunch of burly men revving up their chainsaws.” The events he listed were the Axe Throw, the Obstacle Pole, the Double Buck, the Wrapper Throw, the Block Toss, a chainsaw steeplechase, and the Jack & Jill double-handed saw contest. That year each event cost $5 to enter, and the winners took cash prizes. The 2026 logs came from Lewis & Son’s, and Nick McElroy set them. When the festival ran a 50/50 raffle for the show in September 2026, the winner, Gregor Bugaeff, gave his winnings back to it.

Saturday evening in 2026 brought a pirate costume contest at 7 and The Shinkle Band at 8, a live country act, with fireworks at 10 PM. The parking on Industrial Way and behind the stadium was full by then. After the fireworks the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Posse directs the traffic out, as the festival says it does every year.

Sunday runs from noon to 5 PM. The Kids Logging Show starts at 1 PM, and in the year Oregon Coast TODAY covered it the program had a Log Roll, a Choker Set and a Plastic Axe Throw for children four to 15. In 2026 the Sunday gate took $2 off for anyone who brought a food donation for Toledo Food Share. When the field was cleaned the next morning, the lost-and-found held a blue Motorola phone, a gold-colored bracelet and a money clip. The clip went back to its owner, and the rest went to the Toledo Police Department.

The court and the grand marshals

Toledo Summer Festival Inc. runs the festival through a volunteer board and committee. In 2026 Mayor Tracy Mix and Councilman Jackie Burns put in time over the weekend.

The court draws girls from the Toledo, Siletz and Eddyville schools, along with homeschooled students from the area. The junior court takes first through third graders and the senior court takes high schoolers. The princesses raise their own money by raffling Easter baskets and wine baskets, and the proceeds pay for dresses, tiaras, the float, and scholarships for the queen and the runner-up. The 2026 court met the Toledo City Council in March. On July 10 the festival announced Rhianne as queen. It also announced a new junior award, the Junior Community Spirit Award, and gave it to Emilee. In August Queen Rhianne was at the Wooden Boat Show, checking in the container boats for the races.

The 2026 grand marshals were Oop and Rita Johnson, and both were born at Toledo Hospital. A. Erling “Oop” Johnson, youngest child of Hans and Alvina Johnson, graduated from Toledo High School in 1963. Rita, a twin, grew up in Otter Rock and graduated from Newport High School in 1966. They married on May 16, 1970, and bought the Toledo house where they still live. Rita worked at the bank and later stayed home to raise four daughters. She volunteered with the Girl Scouts, the Tall Timber Swim Team and Lincoln County 4-H, sewed prom dresses, and hemmed jeans for local families. Oop worked more than 40 years at the Georgia-Pacific mill in Toledo, first at the bag plant and then, after it closed, in the tool room. In retirement he became known for fixing lawn mowers and chain saws for his neighbors.

A mill town on the Yaquina

The mill where Oop Johnson worked goes back to World War I. The federal government needed lightweight spruce for aircraft, so it built a large spruce mill in Toledo along with railroad lines to feed it. The war ended before the mill reached full production. The Pacific Spruce Corporation bought the holdings, and the operation became the C. D. Johnson Lumber Company, which employed about 800 people by 1924. The city’s history estimates that 15 to 20 billion board feet of marketable timber once stood in the surrounding country. By the middle decades of the century Toledo was the industrial center of Lincoln County. Georgia-Pacific bought the company in 1952.

The town itself is older. John Graham, an Irish-born immigrant who had lived in Toledo, Ohio, established the settlement near the Yaquina River in 1866 under the Homestead Act, together with William Mackey and Graham’s son Joseph. He named it after the Ohio town. The land was already home to Indigenous people whose descendants are represented today by the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and settlement brought conflict over reservation lands. The Corvallis and Yaquina Bay Railroad was incorporated in 1872, and its last spike was driven on July 4, 1885. By 1890 the downtown had a waterfront hotel, a saloon, a feed stable and a blacksmith shop. The date of incorporation is unsettled. The first ordinance was written and an election held in 1893, and businessman W. C. Copeland challenged that incorporation because the boundaries had not been properly described. The city seal bears the date 1905.

In 1925 the C. D. Johnson company hired Japanese workers for hard mill work at lower wages than white workers. A public demonstration turned violent when a crowd entered the residential area called “Tokyo Slough” and forced the Japanese workers out of Toledo. The workers were taken to Corvallis. A collection was later taken up in the community as an attempt at reparation, and five of the workers won a lawsuit against leaders of the crowd.

In the 1950s Newport replaced Toledo as the county seat, and improvements to Highway 20 bypassed the downtown. The Toledo Oregon Chamber of Commerce gives Georgia-Pacific’s pulp mill as the second-largest employer in Lincoln County. A short-line train called the Toledo Hauler serves it daily. One Spot, a 1922 Baldwin steam engine and the last steam logger in Oregon, stands on permanent display near the waterfront, where the town sometimes posts scarecrow engineers beside it.