Orange City Tulip Festival
Orange City, IA · Festival
- When
- May 20–22, 2027
- Where
- Downtown Orange City · Orange City · IA
- Cost
- Not confirmed
- Status
- Approximate: based on past editions, not announced yet
Orange City's Dutch heritage festival has run every third weekend of May since 1936, filling downtown with twice daily Volksparades in traditional costume, a craft show and an antique tractor show. Between fifty and a hundred thousand visitors come to see the tulip plantings across the town.
The history within reach
Sergeant Charles Floyd was the only member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to die on the journey, on August 20, 1804, probably of a burst appendix, and the party buried him on this bluff above the Missouri, which now carries his name.
The show was filmed in California, but Walnut Grove is the real prairie town Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in and wrote about, on the banks of Plum Creek.
- Templeton Rye93 mi
During Prohibition this Iowa farm town of a few hundred ran a bootleg rye operation of genuine scale, 'Templeton rye' was the good stuff in Midwest speakeasies, and Al Capone's outfit was a customer.
- The Corn Palace111 mi
A Moorish-domed civic building redecorated every year with murals made of maize, around 275,000 ears, split and nailed into place in a dozen natural colours grown for the purpose.
A supervolcano in what is now Idaho blanketed the plains in abrasive ash twelve million years ago, and animals crowding a waterhole died of lung failure over days and weeks.