View Entire Page
Other Corvallis Festivals
Country Fair
Fall Festival
Da
Vinci Days
Shrewsbury
Oktoberfest
Fourth of July
Festivals are as old as Corvallis. Following
is a 1938 description of the 1873 annual 4th of July fest, from Nattie Spencer,
an aged and retired OSU professor:
"
The big event of the year was the Fourth of July. Everyone
in the countryside got together on that day for the only time in the year. The
new babies were shown off, and the new brides who would be exhibiting babies
next year.Everyone would load their wagons with all the food they could haul and
come to town early in the morning. On our first big Fourth at Corvallis mother
made two hundred gooseberry pies. You can see what an event it was.There would
be floats in the morning and the one that got the eye was the Goddess of
Liberty. She was supposed to be the most wholesome and prettiest girl in the
countryside and if she wasn't she had friends who thought she was. But the rest
of us weren't always in agreement on that. She rode on a hay-rack and wore a
white gownThe most common headresses in the area were straw hats and bonnets.
Click on the images above for patterns and/or instructions on their manufacture.
Sometimes the driver wore an Uncle Sam hat and striped pants. All along the
sides of the hay-rack were little girls who represented the states of the union.
The smallest was always Rhode Island.
All this took place at Corvallis and the
people from Albany used to come up river by boat.Following the float would be
the Oregon Agricultural College cadets, and some kind of a band. Sometimes there
would be political effigies.Just before lunch - and we'd always hold lunch up
for an hour - some Senator or lawyer would speak. These speeches always had one
pattern. First the speaker would challenge England to a fight and berate the
King and say that he was a skunk. This was known as twisting the lion's tail.
Then the next theme was that any one could find 'freedom and liberty' on our
shores. The speaker would invite those who were heavy laden in other lands to
come to us and find peace. The speeches were pretty fiery and by that time the
men who drank got into fights and called each other Englishmen. In the afternoon
we had what we called the 'plug uglies' and funny floats - sad clowns who took
off on the political subjects of the day.There would be some music and then the
families would start gathering together to go home. There were cows waiting to
be milked and the stock to be fed and so there was no night life. The Fourth was
the day of the year that really counted then. Christmas wasn't much; a Church
tree or something, but no one twisted the lion's tail."
Back to Corvallis Community Pages