Wheeler County Bluegrass Festival

On the first weekend in July, folding chairs and blankets cover the lawn in front of the Wheeler County Courthouse in Fossil. Visitors bring their own, because the festival provides no seating and charges no admission. The brick courthouse was built in 1902 and is still in use. In 2010 the Bend Source described its grounds as doubling for the festival’s stage, with people coming out from the shade of big cottonwoods to listen. Local vendors sell food and treats. Dogs are allowed on leash, and the festival’s notice adds, “Barking not tolerated.” Fossil sits at the junction of Highways 19 and 218 in north-central Oregon, about three hours by road from Bend or Portland. It is the seat of Wheeler County, which the festival calls the only county in Oregon with more horses than people.

The lawn on Adams Street

The 2026 festival ran July 3 to 5. Friday opened with workshops from 10 in the morning to 12:45 and an open mic at one o’clock. A band played each hour after that until the last set at eight: Dan Robinson, the Rosa Lees, Benji Nagel and Vern Johnson, Westbound Sky, Old Time Machine, Skillethead, and Never Come Down. Saturday brought most of the same bands back in a different order and closed with Skillethead at 8:15.

Most of the bands come from Oregon. Never Come Down formed in Portland in 2018 and has played Hardly Strictly Bluegrass and RockyGrass. Skillethead, from the Central Oregon desert, works around single mics and may set a Stanley Brothers number beside a rock cover. The Rosa Lees, from Southern Oregon, trace their line to Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, and Rose Maddox. Buffalo Kin is a duo that sings cowboy folk tunes and originals, and its latest EP is called “Vaquera.” Benji Nagel and Vern Johnson, a Central Oregon duo, play dobro-heavy sets drawn from Doc Watson to the Moody Blues.

Darin Gentry, who leads Old Time Machine, comes from the hills of Western North Carolina and plays fiddle and clawhammer banjo. The West Virginia musician Dwight Diller called him “in my opinion one of the best under-thirty clawhammer banjo players today.” Gentry’s band is a trio with Dale and Suzanne Adkins, now joined by Joe Ellingson.

Dan Robinson plays western swing. He also paints the festival’s posters every year, and his wife, Melanie, does the graphic design. His band was once called the Wheeler County Ramblers. In 2026 it took a new name to honor its bass player, Gene, who had died earlier that year.

Some groups are put together for the weekend. Fossilgrass draws its members from the workshop teachers, and in 2026 they were Don Share, Joe Ellingson, and Paul Elliott. Jonti Siman is a jazz bassist from South Africa who picks fiddle tunes on the bass. He came to Fossil for the first time in 2026 and played a Saturday set with Dale Adkins, whom the festival calls his “musical dueling partner.”

Saturday noon in 2026 brought something new. The Cruise In is a classic car rally held every year on Main Street between the fairgrounds and the courthouse. That year it had live bluegrass for its lunch crowd for the first time, played by Brokentop Bluegrass, a Bend quartet that names part of its repertoire “Primordial Oozegrass.”

A dollar in the bucket

Mornings are for teaching, and the workshops are free. Children from five to twelve meet at ten on Friday and Saturday. They learn a bluegrass song, try instruments at what the festival calls an “instrument petting zoo,” and finish with a jam. On Saturday at 12:45 they give a recital on the courthouse stage. Carol Harley and members of the Misty Mamas hold a slow jam in the shaded backyard of the Hyatt House. In 2026 Gentry taught on both days, Siman gave a bass workshop, and Richard Melling taught resophonic guitar, or dobro, on Saturday morning.

The Fossil Songwriting Contest follows at 1:30 on Saturday. Entrants sing an original song about Fossil or any other small town. The audience picks the winner by dropping dollars into the bucket set out for each song. Jay Bowerman, who founded the festival, has written a song about Fossil himself.

The festival ends before noon on Sunday. In 2026 the Misty Mamas sang a gospel set at 10:30 and then led an hour-long sing-along with Carol Harley, with Sue Moore on upright bass. Everyone was handed a free songbook of 20 gospel and “feel good” songs, with words and chords.

Tents by the fossil beds

Visitors who stay the night mostly camp. The Wheeler County Fairgrounds, on East Third Street about a five-minute walk from the courthouse, takes tents and RVs without reservations and charges $5 for a shower. In 2025 the festival and Wheeler County Community Transportation began running a shuttle between the fairgrounds and the courthouse stage.

The city park campground was closed for renovation in 2026, so the festival arranged walk-in tent camping on the high school football field. The festival called it “a lovely grassy area with a fantastic view and fossil digging right there.” The public fossil beds behind Wheeler High School are open to anyone, and the county says that for a small fee visitors may keep what they find.

Music at the fairgrounds goes on after dark. In 2010 the Source reported that once the courthouse concerts ended, the hundreds of amateur musicians camped there began jamming. They came, the paper said, “to pick, fiddle, strum and sing well into the morning hours.”

A concert for Bill Bowerman

Bill Bowerman, the University of Oregon and Olympic track coach, was a Fossil native, and he died in 2000. “In the summer of 2000, I decided to have an informal free concert to celebrate the life of my father who had passed away earlier in the year,” his son Jay Bowerman told the Source. He brought in Misty River, an all-women acoustic band from Eugene. The band’s members told other players about Fossil. Later that summer the guitarist Dale Adkins, whose name the Source spells Atkins, offered to come play if Bowerman ever put on another weekend concert.

In 2001 and 2002 the program grew to include Misty River, a band led by Adkins, and a melodrama. “The melodrama troupe were doing their own thing apart from us,” Bowerman said. “But we joined forces and started working off a real stage set up on the County Courthouse grounds. Between 50 and 100 people showed up each of the next two years for the free music and melodrama.”

Fossil had once held a large Fourth of July parade with a brass band and floats, but interest had waned. The musicians set out to revive it, and “pretty soon the parade was a Fourth fixture,” Bowerman said. An art show followed.

The festival marked its tenth anniversary in 2010, and the Source described the parade forming a few minutes past noon on the Fourth. Vintage cars lined up behind a group of 4-H kids. The county princess arrived on horseback in full cowgirl regalia, and war veterans rode a flatbed trailer behind a tractor. A restored pioneer-era stagecoach joined them, and the whole procession made an eight-block circuit past the mercantile store.

Between sets that year, the melodrama troupe played a villain for hissing, an innocent heroine, and a hero. The daytime bill had the flatpicker Dan Crary, Misty River, and the Great Northern Planes band. “We’ve made a conscious effort to avoid trying to get the very big name acts,” Bowerman said. “Presenting them would ruin the dynamics of the Festival and raise too many expectations.”

The festival now lists Bowerman as creator and producer, Suzanne Adkins as artistic director, and Dale Adkins as “Chief Loafer.” It has been free for more than 20 years. It is paid for by a grant that, the organizers write, has not risen with costs, so they have started a donation program. They count 2027, with dates of July 2 to 4, as the festival’s 25th year.

Hoover, Chambers, and the county seat

By Jay Bowerman’s account, his family’s tie to Fossil goes back to the town’s beginnings. “My father’s great-grandfather, J.W. Chambers, discovered the site in the mid 1860s where Fossil now sits while riding with a group of Indians,” he told the Source. “In 1867, he brought his family here and eventually his son, Thomas, and his wife, Mary Jane, opened the post office and the mercantile store. The town grew up around these two buildings.”

The Oregon Encyclopedia tells it another way. Tenino and Wasco peoples, now enrolled in the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, lived in the region before white settlement. Thomas Benton Hoover, a Missourian, settled with his family in 1870 about two miles north of the present town. In 1876 he opened a post office at his ranch and named it Fossil after fossils found in the area.

In 1881 Hoover and Thomas Watson built a store where Butte and Cottonwood Creeks meet and moved the post office there. The next year George and W.S. Thompson opened a general mercantile, and the Thompson brothers platted the town. The first city council met on March 4, 1891. More than two hundred people lived there by the late 1880s, and the Encyclopedia puts the population now at about 447.

Wheeler County was formed on February 17, 1899. It was named for Henry H. Wheeler, who ran the first stage and mail line through it, and Fossil won the county seat over Spray and Twickenham. The courthouse went up in 1902, and in 1920 William Jennings Bryan spoke from its steps.

From 1927 to 1978, Fossil shared its part of the county with Kinzua, a company logging town about seven miles east, and during those years Fossil grew past eight hundred people. The Kinzua Company closed the mill and the town in 1978, and within a few years enrollment at the Fossil high school fell by half. Kinzua is a ghost town now. Richard Melling once entered a song about it in the Fossil Songwriting Contest.