Whiskey Flat Days

The encampment on Scodie Avenue

On Scodie Avenue, across from the rodeo grounds, the Whiskey Flat Encampment opens for the day. The cowboy and mountain-men camp keeps a Wells Fargo station and eatery, chuck wagon cooking and coffee, a horse trader and livery, a farrier and a horse doctor. A saddle maker works leather beside the Whiskey Flats Saloon. A Justice of the Peace keeps his post, and there are a bath house, a “beautifier and hygenist,” storytellers of the Old West, mining and sawmill demonstrations, and a Civil War Confederate camp. The schedule for 2025 promised “history and gunfights.” On Sunday morning the encampment holds an Old West church service at ten o’clock.

The Kernville Chamber of Commerce runs the festival. Each Presidents’ Day weekend the town, about 50 miles east of Bakersfield on Highway 178, goes by its old name, Whiskey Flat, for four days. Many residents dress in Western clothes for it. The 2025 edition, the 68th, ran February 14 through 17 under the theme “Rhinestones & Wranglers.”

Parade, shootouts, and the Whiskerino

The grand parade is the traditional kickoff. It runs Saturday morning from ten to eleven, and the roads close for it. In 2012 the Renegade Rip, the Bakersfield College paper, reported the parade moving down Kernville Road with floats “from all walks of life,” some riders dressed as cowboys and others as Indians, and Kern Valley High School and Cerro Coso Community College among the entries. In 1987 the parade had 200 entries under the theme “Those Good Old Golden Days.”

The festival opened on Friday evening in 2025 with a street dance in Circle Park, where Fist Full of Nickels played. On Saturday and Sunday the main stage on Tobias Street carried bluegrass and country-western bands, The Rivals and Angels Roost among them. Twice each afternoon, at 2:15 and 3:15, an Old West shootout played out on the same street for ten minutes. Sunday brought the contests: costume, with categories for children, men, and women; a pet parade; the Whiskerino, a beard contest; and a fiddle contest. A free line-dancing class followed. The full list of contests also takes in frog jumping and an epitaph contest, and there are an art show, carnival rides, and craft booths.

Visitors come for the food. In 2012 the Rip named the vendors most in demand as the Indian tacos, the kettle corn, and the Sausage King. “This is my third year coming to this and I come here because of the food,” said Tanika Waye, a Kernville local. “It’s really good.” The same reporter found a mechanical bull at Riverside Park. “I thought I was going to fall off!” said eight-year-old Bessie Spielman after her ride. Other attractions that year were square dancing, a melodrama, face painting, and a pool where young children could fish for live trout.

Rodeo at McNally Arena

The rodeos are held at the John E. McNally Rodeo Arena on Rio Vista Drive, a fenced ground with bucking chutes, holding pens, a roping chute, bleachers for more than a thousand people, and a snack bar, beer booth, and barbecue booth. Kern County sold the property to the chamber in 1964.

The Iron Horse Rodeo, held Friday evening, puts machines in the arena. Its 2025 events included motorcycle and quad barrel racing, quad hide races, a Pony Express relay, and a Harley-Davidson barrel race. The Wild West Daze Rodeo follows on the weekend with open team roping, bull riding, a hide race, open and junior barrel races, a calf scramble, and sheep riding. In 2025 an adult ticket to the Wild West Daze Rodeo cost $22.69 and children under six got in free.

On Sunday afternoon the festival announces the winner of the campaign for Whiskey Flat mayor. The office raises money. The chamber collected the proceeds of the mayor’s race over the years to pay for the building and materials of its own meeting room and office. Construction began in 1972 under Leland Scott, a local contractor, and townspeople donated all the labor.

The businessmen of Circle Park

The first mayor of Whiskey Flat was Ardis Walker, in 1957. The festival was new then, and so was the town. In 1953 an earth-fill dam closed off the Kern River and formed Isabella Lake, which drowned the original Kernville. The town was moved to a new site at the north end of the lake. The Los Angeles Times dated the relocated town to 1952 and described it in 1987 as a small town square ringed by Western-style false-front stores. According to the chamber’s history, while the old town was settling into its new location between 1952 and 1957, the businessmen around Circle Park formed the Kernville Downtown Businessmen’s Association. Their businesses included the main market, Archie’s Hardware, Jim’s Museum, the drug store, the Odd Fellows Hall, and the Westerner. These men came up with Whiskey Flat Days, first held in 1957. On October 11 of that year their association became the Kernville Chamber of Commerce. The festival, the Rip wrote, celebrates “the old town of Whiskey Flat that existed under what is now Lake Isabella.”

Walker was born in Keyesville in 1901. He worked as an engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York and then came home to write poetry. In 1938 he was elected Justice of the Peace in Kernville, and an added room in his house served as the courtroom. He and his wife Gayle started a motel in Kernville in 1953. A biography published by the Death Valley ‘49ers records that he was president of the Kernville Chamber of Commerce when Whiskey Flat Days began.

The February date was chosen on purpose. “We still rely on this celebration 55 years later to help us survive through the winter months up here in a town of only 1,860 people,” Cheryl Borthick, chamber president, told the Rip in 2012. “That’s why it’s in February, and we always pray we have decent weather for the festival.” That year an estimated 50,000 people came. In 1987, the 31st year, the Times expected as many as 50,000 visitors, enough to quadruple the town’s population, for frog races, a greased-pig chase, a professional rodeo, and melodramas. The festival was held every year until 2021. That year the edition set for February 12 through 15 was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. The sitting Whiskey Flat mayor, Sky Rocket Jami, organized virtual events promising “raffles and shenanigans!” The 70th annual Whiskey Flat Days is set for February 12 through 15, 2027.

A plank across two barrels

The origin of the name has more than one version. The California state historical landmark record, whose marker stands at the Old Kernville Cemetery on Wofford Road southeast of town, says Kernville was founded in 1860, when the whiskey dealer Adam Hamilton moved his shop there from Quartzburg, a camp the record calls “more temperate.” Both camps grew out of a strike by “Lovely” Rogers, who found the Big Blue Ledge while tracking a stray mule from the earlier camp of Keysville. The Times, writing in 1987, dated the start of the mining camp to soon after gold was found in the surrounding mountains in 1853. By that account the camp took its name from its main attraction, a makeshift saloon made of two whiskey barrels with a plank across their tops. Borthick gave the Rip two versions: some believe the name came from the town’s many saloons, while others credit Hamilton and his plank on two barrels. All the sources agree that the name ended in 1864, when the camp became Kernville.

“Some of the folk, mainly the ladies, decided it was a very unbecoming name for their town and renamed it Kernville,” said Borthick.