After a year away, Lynden Farmers Day Parade returns in full force — almost
Children screamed gleefully as they scrambled over one another to grab the candy scattered across Lynden’s Front Street. Families set up camp, spreading picnic blankets, settling into lawn chairs and even squatting on overturned buckets. The area echoed with the clip-clop of horse hooves on pavement and blaring honks of tractors and trucks. This is the Lynden Farmers Day Parade.
The annual event returned Saturday, July 17, albeit in a slightly different fashion, after it was canceled last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Usually, the parade is held in the first days of June but was postponed to July this year as officials attempted to determine whether the community could gather safely. The celebration is one of the longest-running parades in the Pacific Northwest, dating back to the early 1900s when farmers would take to the streets to show off their produce and animals.
“Community events are such a vital part of being a community. Otherwise, you’re just a place where people live,” said Gary Vis, executive director of Lynden’s Chamber of Commerce, which organizes the event. “You need to gather, you need to get together and see friendly faces, meet new people.”
Lynden has seen some of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in Whatcom County in recent months, though they have been decreasing steadily since mid-May, according to the Whatcom County Health Department. As of July 3, Lynden had 1,755 total cases, with the rate of new infections per 100,000 residents in the two weeks prior to July 3 decreasing from 177 to 107. The Lynden school district area has the third-lowest vaccination rate in the county at 44.6 percent, following Mount Baker and Nooksack Valley, according to the health department’s July 3 data.
There were no COVID-19 precautions taken at this year’s Farmers Day Parade. Once Gov. Jay Inslee lifted restrictions statewide at the end of June, Vis said, the Chamber of Commerce determined holding an outdoor event such as the parade was safe. Plus, Vis said, the region didn’t see an uptick in cases following Lynden’s Northwest Lighted Christmas Parade in December, which garnered thousands of visitors and led to gridlock downtown.
“We have no authority or ability to regulate public space. We aren’t going to worry about stuff we can’t control,” Vis said. “We always tell people to be safe, but we just want to get people together, that’s the most important thing.”
The parade’s postponed date made it difficult for many of the groups that would typically walk in the event to do so. School bands, choruses and drama clubs didn’t participate because school is not in session. Some agricultural equipment dealers that would usually show off their products are sold out of tractors and the like, since it’s prime harvest season for a number of crops. Vis said the parade was down about a dozen entries.
But that didn’t matter to local residents who have been craving community events.
What makes this event so special is people being together again, said Janet Johnson, a lifelong Everson resident who attends the parade every year. “We needed this really bad.”
This story was originally published July 17, 2021 at 2:46 PM.
