Arroyo Grande Valley
84th Annual Harvest
Festival & Parade
September 29 & 30, 2023

ENTERTAINMENT
Here's a peek at some of this year's entertainment! Check out all the fun we're going to have on Friday and Saturday!
This year we have a great lineup of Entertainment for you with some of your old favorites and some new exciting venues too!
We also have a variety of displays and events, something for everyone in the family.
FRIDAY
SATURDAY
Booths & Games
9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Come enjoy fun carnival games, shopping booths, food booths and so much more located in Olohan Alley.
10 am Balooney the Clown

The Cuest Ridge Band will perform. Local favorites that specialize in bluegrass, Americana, and country.
SLO County Stumblers
11:30 - 3:30 pm
AG Pavilion

The Cuest Ridge Band will perform. Local favorites that specialize in bluegrass, Americana, and country.
SOPA Performance
1:00 pm
Centennial Park

The studio of performing arts has been a staple in our community for over 20 years. They provide opportunities for all performing artists including dance , drama , music , competitive dance , and many stage performances throughout the year . Staring at age 2-adult , there’s a little something for everyone !
HERITAGE SQUARE PARK/ ROTARY BANDSTAND ENTERTAINMENT
Friday
6:30 pm - Free Movie Night. Disney's Encanto. Movie starts at 7:30 pm
Saturday
12:30 pm - Doggie Agility with SLODOG
1:00 pm - Studio of Performing Arts
2:00 pm - FLEX Performing Arts (dance) with Coastal Performing Arts
Foundation (dance and theater)
3:00 pm - Magician Jim Wilson
3:30 pm - Kiddie Parade with Ballooney the Clown
IOOF Hall History Presentations
Noon: "Arroyo Grande's Wild West”
by Jim Gregory, President, South County Historical Society
Tombstone and Dodge City are more famous, but Arroyo Grande has a Wild West to rival theirs. In 1848, town founder Francis Branch and his friend John Price discovered the victims of California’s first mass murder. Branch’s son-in-law, county schools superintendent David Newsom, for whom Newsom Canyon is named, discovered on an 1850s ride south to Santa Barbara that skeletal remains appeared then about as often as Andersen’s Pea Soup billboards do today. Lopez Canyon was rife with property disputes: in 1886, bitterness between two families resulted in murder and a double lynching at the foot of Crown Hill. A decade later, a body found in a vacant lot near The Palace, a San Luis Obispo house of ill repute, was tied to a Lopez Canyon feud, as well. Arroyo Grande’s first school, on Nevada Street, had to be moved when a gunfight broke out at the nearby Ryan Hotel stables, and a town constable, Henry Lewellyn, was shot dead in the doorway of the Capitol Saloon on Branch Street in 1904. Move over, Tombstone.
1 p.m.: Cowboy Poetry
by Bob Perrault and Friends
Join Local Cowboy Poet Bob Perrault and his friends for an hour of Cowboy
Poetry at 1: Pm in the I.O O. F Hall, on September 24 th as a part of the Harvest
Festival. Bob will provide stories and tales from a lifetime of living close to his
horse and experiencing western life. Some folks may recall Bob for his former
“day Job” as the City Manager for Grover Beach, but Bob was raised close by
Ventura County he spent his formative years chasing critters on the ranches and
farms. Since that time, he has stayed true to his western roots.
2pm: History Videos:
Video Entitled: How did Arroyo Grande wind up with nearly sixty Civil War veterans? The connection between these settlers and the Pacific Coast Railroad.
Video Entitled: What three waves of immigration marked the Arroyo Grande Valley in the early 20th century? The local impact of the Depression and New Deal.
2 p.m.:The Pacific Coast Railway:
Why a Railroad to the Coast including the Arroyo Grande Valley
by Andrew Merriam, Board Member of the San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum
The timing of this year’s Harvest Festival is just three months prior to the 150th anniversary of the incorporation of San Luis Obispo’s first railroad. A railroad that stopped in Arroyo Grande at the old Loomis warehouse. What was to become the narrow-gauge Pacific Coast Railway was incorporated in 1872 by John Harford to transport the agricultural products out and bring manufactured goods in to the then isolated San Luis Obispo and northern Santa Barbara Counties. Passengers and freight were boarded on ships at Avila to connect to the California coast from Seattle to San Diego. Andrew Merriam, a local resident of SLO for 65 years and a board member of the San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum, will offer the history of this very interesting and very local railroad which connected our area to the rest of California prior to highways, street paving and motorized vehicles
3 p.m.: "World War II Arroyo Grande"
by Jim Gregory, President, South County Historical Society
The war’s impact on our town, population 1,090 in the 1940 census,
was immediate. Two Arroyo Grande sailors were killed on battleship
Arizona on December 7. What followed were nearly four years of
deprivation and commitment at home—and even greater commitment
from those in uniform: The grocer’s son who brought his crippled B-17 home from a mission over Berlin; the fireman who fought in Easy Company, the “Band of Brothers;” the woman Marine who became, for a day, the president’s chauffeur; the fighting prowess of Filipino-Americans, whose first regiment was formed at Camp San Luis Obispo; the tragic frequency of air crashes from training flights out of bases in Santa Maria; perhaps the war’s central tragedy, the enforcement of Executive Order 9066, which ironically served to reveal the dignity—and loyalty-- of Japanese-Americans and the heroism of their sons who volunteered to fight.

Photo of Arroyo Grande looking south toward Santa Maria taken about 1906. The PCRY mainline is to the left with a boxcar on the tracks close to the warehouse/station which was owned in later years by the Loomis family.

