Object: Apple Blossom Festival Postcard Booklet, April 1927
Catalog #: 1988.40.4
Donor: John F. Gordon

When you imagine flower-strewn floats, you might think of Pasadena, California, and the Rose Bowl Parade, not Rogers, Arkansas. But for five years, from 1923 to 1927, the city was home to an annual spring spectacle which brought thousands of visitors from the region and sent hundreds of local residents into a frenzy of activity.

It all started with W.R. Cady, a local businessman and orchardist who in 1922 attended a peach festival in Georgia. When he proposed that Rogers hold a similar festival for apples, community leaders were enthusiastic. It was a huge undertaking, requiring months of planning and the “everlasting team work of every bloomin’ soul,” as stated in the 1927 postcard booklet.

Rogers was a natural for the festival. From the turn of the 20th century the area had been known as the “Land of the Big Red Apple.” In 1901 Benton County’s crop of two-and-a-half million bushels set a national record for one county. The production of apple cider vinegar was a major industry, and each town had at least one evaporator to dry apples. Thousands of car loads of fresh and dried apples were shipped from Rogers on the Frisco Railroad.  (To learn more about Rogers' apple industry, click here.)

In many ways the Apple Blossom Festival was as much a celebration of spring as of the apple industry. Many of the parade floats had spring themes.  (To see an Apple Blossom Festival float, click here.)  Automobile tours through the orchards offered a dazzling scene of apple trees in full bloom. But it was the pageants and coronation of the Queen which were truly rites of spring, borrowed by pageant planners from the traditional May Day celebration of England and its earlier counterparts in Greece and Rome. The Queen’s attendants, such as the Sunshine Girls, Ozark Breezes, Trees, and Butterflies, were symbols of nature. Dances had such fanciful names as The Breath of Spring and The Rainbow Dance.

The Festival was designed to promote tourism in Northwest Arkansas, with one Fort Smith newspaper predicting that due to the Festival, the area’s fame as a “playground for the nation” would spread to compete with Florida and California. The Frisco Railroad heavily promoted the Festival and ran special trains from Joplin, Springfield, St. Louis, and elsewhere. Crowds of people, up to an estimated 35,000 in 1926, poured into Northwest Arkansas to attend the celebration.

But the Festival was also an expression of pride in local communities, the region, and in Arkansas. The themes of many city-sponsored floats made proclamations about a unique characteristic of their city, such as the Winslow float which showcased “Apple Blossom Land’s Only All Woman City Government.” The floats were elaborate crepe-paper affairs filled with beautiful girls, young children, and whimsical structures like a gazebo, a tin castle, and a giant chicken with her golden eggs of prosperity. Shaped like an ocean liner, the “U.S.S. Golden,” the float for the Rogers Community Club, featured young girls peeping out through petal-fringed portholes. The Gentry float was covered in lattice and blossoms, with an rainbow arching overhead and the slogan, “California Yesterday, Florida Today, Ozarks Tomorrow,” reflecting the belief that Northwest Arkansas was on its way to becoming the nation’s fruit basket.

But by 1927 the apple industry in Benton County was in serious trouble. Plagued by diseases and late frosts, the orchards were no longer profitable. And the Festival was having problems too. Frequent spring rains, the amount of time involved in putting on the event, and the difficulty in finding volunteers all contributed to its end. The tradition was partly revived from 1934 through 1942 with banquets and orchard tours, but the elaborate parades and pageants were never held again. By the late 1930s the chicken had replaced the apple as the major industry in Northwest Arkansas. But a few folks still remember the parades, pageants, speeches, dances, and music. Through newspaper accounts, memoirs, and oral histories, the Museum has collected the remembrances of several folks who were involved with the Festival in their youth.

Dot Webb - “They advertised that there would be maids of honor chosen [for the Festival]. In Pea Ridge it was a penny a vote and the one that had the most votes was chosen... I had some boyfriends who went around selling votes for me... When it came time for the Festival all the girls were there from each community and they drew the Queen’s name from a hat. My name was drawn. I was only 16 years old... I was so shy and young that I really kind of wished I hadn’t won. To me, Rogers was just a huge city. To a girl from the country it was just really the equivalent of New York City.”

Margaret Ann Smith Troutman - “I was one of the “Radiant Redheads” on a float entered in the Apple Blossom Festival by the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce. There were ten girls chosen for the float... We all wore brown sateen dresses. Our float was pulled by six sorrel (red) horses. On the float was a Horn of Plenty made of gold and brown leaves...”

Verna Faber - “We’d spend hours and hours indoors making the crepe paper apple blossoms... We all just held our breath that the parade would come off and people would get to see it before it rained and all that crepe paper went down to nothing.”

Irene Graham Doesher - “I was the Maid of Honor from Monte Ne...it was great. I can’t remember a year when it didn’t rain...and everybody got soaked. The year I was Maid of Honor, the road washed out between Monte Ne and Rogers. There were holes half as big as this house...”

Elmer Russell - “It usually rained every day and I remember helping push cars so they could make room for the parade to get down the street. I got pretty wet.”

Virgil Lovelace - “The San Jose scale began infesting the orchards...a little yellow parasite - kind of like an Arkansas chigger. It would multiply so fast it would draw all of the sap out of the tree and it would die. Our entire orchard was devastated by this - nearly every orchard in Northwest Arkansas was devastated. It affected our economy a lot, but Arkansas is very versatile - we switched to other things.”