At the festival's 30th anniversary event in September 2024, Toni and Phil Scully climbed onto an antique tractor and rode it down Main Street as grand marshals of the Kelseyville Pear Festival's parade, marking, per Lake County News, the first time they had served in that role. Most of the crowd lining the sidewalks that morning were there for the floats, the tractors, the kids waving at Barty the Pear. Fewer of them were thinking about what the Scullys actually represent: Scully Packing Co. is, at this point, Lake County's only remaining pear packing company. A festival built to celebrate an agricultural industry gave its highest honor that year to the one business still doing the work that industry is named for.
That's the detail worth sitting with before you plan your weekend around this year's festival, which runs Friday, September 25 through Saturday, September 26, 2026, in downtown Kelseyville.
From a Handful of Vendors to a Regional Draw
The first Kelseyville Pear Festival was organized by the Kelseyville Business Association in 1993, and by every account it was small: a handful of street vendors, a barbeque, a scarecrow contest. The festival has run every year since with a single exception, pausing in 2020 for COVID, and has otherwise pushed through wildfire seasons that reshaped how the county thinks about late summer. This year's event is billed as the 32nd Annual Kelseyville Pear Festival, set for September 25 and 26, 2026.
That's a longer unbroken run than most small-town festivals in the North Bay can claim, and the growth curve underneath it is steep.
| 1993 (first festival) | 2024 (30th anniversary) | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendors | A handful of street vendors | Over 180 |
| Draw | A barbeque and a scarecrow contest | Tens of thousands of visitors over one Saturday |
By the 30th anniversary weekend in September 2024, downtown Kelseyville was drawing over 180 vendors and tens of thousands of visitors, according to Lake County News's coverage of that event. Over the same three decades, the pear packing side of the business narrowed down to a single operator, Scully Packing Co. The festival scaled up while the industry it's named for scaled down. That's not a coincidence worth glossing over. It means the event has quietly become less about showcasing a functioning pear economy and more about keeping the memory of one alive, funded now by craft vendors, food booths, and a beer and wine tent rather than by the packing sheds themselves.
The Weekend, If You're Going
The two days run on different logic, and it's worth knowing which one you're walking into.
Friday, September 25, 5 to 10 p.m. is the 9th Annual Farm to Fork Dinner & Dance, a family-style meal served down the middle of Main Street and prepared by Saw Shop Public House, with dancing afterward to the Funky Dozen. Tickets are sold through Eventbrite in two configurations, tables of eight for $1,000 and tables of four for $500, capped at 500 people total. They went on sale June 1 at 7 a.m. and organizers expected them to sell out within a couple of hours. If you didn't buy in already, this part of the weekend is spoken for. Plan around Saturday instead.
Saturday, September 26, 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. is the free, open-to-everyone day:
- A pancake breakfast at the Kelseyville Fire House has opened around 7:30 in recent years
- Vendor booths along Main Street open at 9
- The parade has kicked off around 9:30 a.m. in recent years, following the breakfast
- Dessert judging happens the day before, at Kelseyville Presbyterian Church, where in 2025 judges tasted 26 entries, an increase over the previous year, including a winning batch of holiday pear cake balls and a second-place entry of buttermilk-cheddar-pear biscuits paired with pear blend iced tea and pear jalapeño jam
- Kids' Town runs jump houses, face painting, pear decorating, and photos with Barty the Pear
- The Ely Stage Stop and Country Museum sets up historical photos, packing shed labels, and antique farm equipment inside the pear pavilion tent, which is the closest thing the festival has to a working museum of what the industry used to look like at scale
- Art from the Konocti Art Society and Konocti Art Club is displayed in the lobby of WestAmerica Bank
If you're driving in, know two things. In recent years, Kelseyville Presbyterian Church, at the corner of Third and Church streets, has sold parking spaces for $10 as a fundraiser and run a pear milkshake booth for $5 a cup. Separately, Lake County's Public Works Department began repair work on the Kelsey Creek Road Bridge in late August 2026, a crossing on the same waterway that runs along Main Street where the antique tractor and engine displays are typically parked. It's worth checking the county's public works updates before you drive in, in case work is still underway on festival weekend.
One Family, One Packing House, One Parade Route
The choice to put the Scullys at the front of the 2024 parade wasn't incidental. Lake County News covered it as a milestone, framing the honor explicitly around the family's role at Scully Packing Co. and noting it was the first time they had served as grand marshals. That's the company that, as of the reporting around the festival's 30th anniversary, is the last pear packing operation still running in a county that built an entire autumn tradition around the fruit.
Compare that to what else has shown up in the parade in recent years. The 2025 Grande Pear Parade gave top honors to a float from Clear Lake State Park, with a local realtor's entry taking second and a tie for third between Latinos United of Lake County and Kelseyville High School's homecoming float. None of those entries are agricultural businesses. The parade has become a snapshot of the town's civic and institutional life generally, a state park, a school, a community organization, with the pear industry itself represented by essentially one family and one company.
That's not a criticism of the festival. It's what makes it worth attending with clearer eyes. You're not watching a trade show for a thriving crop economy. You're watching a town keep its founding story alive on purpose, year after year, even as the thing that story is about narrows down to a single operator.
What the Festival Actually Preserves
None of this means the festival is hollow. If anything, the opposite. A celebration that has run every year since 1993 except one, pausing only in 2020 for a global pandemic, says something about how a small town decides what's worth protecting. The Kelseyville Business Association didn't just launch an event in 1993 to promote pear sales. Three decades later, with the packing industry down to Scully Packing Co. alone, the town is still showing up, still judging pear desserts, still lining up antique tractors along Main Street. The festival has outlasted the industry's contraction because the town decided the story mattered more than the balance sheet behind it.
If you live in Big Valley or anywhere else in Lake County, that's worth knowing walking into this year's event. The pear pavilion tent isn't just nostalgia dressed up for a Saturday. It's the clearest annual reminder of how much the local agricultural economy has consolidated, and how much civic effort it now takes to keep that history visible at all.
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