Ruston’s Peach Festival has grown into a tradition, with or without the juicy fruit
by Wesley Harris
Summer in Ruston has long had a taste of its own.
It is the taste of a peach picked at the right time, soft enough to promise sweetness but firm enough to hold in the hand. It is the smell of peach cobbler, peach ice cream, and fresh fruit set out for sale along the road. It is also the sound of music downtown, the sight of children in festival crowds, and the annual reminder that a crop grown in the hills of Lincoln Parish became one of Ruston’s most enduring symbols.
This year, a late March freeze destroyed the Ruston peach crop. But never fear, the 76th Louisiana Peach Festival will happen without the local delicacy. Peaches have been shipped in from other states.
It’s not the first time a local peach crop has been lost to weather. But one way or another, the festival endures.
The festival not begin merely as entertainment. It began as promotion. By the late 1930s, commercial peach orchards had taken root in Lincoln Parish. Farmers had discovered the red hills around Ruston could produce peaches of unusual quality and the fruit became more than just another crop.
It became part of the community’s identity.
In 1947, area growers organized the Louisiana Fruit Growers Association. Their purpose was practical: to support and promote the fruit industry. Four years later, in 1951, that effort produced a public celebration. J.E. Mitcham, president of the association, and Walter Smith, chairman of the first festival board, helped organize the first Louisiana Peach Festival.
The first festival was not a small backyard gathering. It was planned as a community-wide event with a peach cookery contest, a local art show, a flower show, athletic contests and games, and the crowning of Queen Dixie Gem and Princess Peach. It brought together agriculture, civic pride, food, beauty, music and local business in a way that would become familiar to generations of Ruston residents.
The response surprised even the organizers.
The festival returned the following year, and the schedule of events expanded. What began as a way to promote Lincoln Parish peaches quickly became a tradition. In 1953, Ruston’s peaches gained national attention when Dorothy Elta Goff, Queen Dixie Gem III, presented a box of Ruston peaches to Vice President Richard Nixon in Washington, D.C.
That image captured the ambition behind the festival. Ruston did not merely want to sell peaches locally. Growers and civic leaders wanted people across Louisiana and beyond to know that Lincoln Parish peaches were something special.
For many years, the festival served exactly that purpose.
It gave local growers a public stage. It brought visitors into town. It connected the harvest season with parades, pageants, art, food and family gatherings. It also helped brand the name “Ruston Peach” even as agriculture changed and the number of commercial orchards declined over time.
Like many long-running traditions, the Peach Festival faced difficult years.
In the early 1980s, a fears of a recession questioned if the event could continue. By May 1982, the festival’s future was uncertain. The Ruston-Lincoln Chamber of Commerce, working with tourism partners, stepped in to help continue the celebration. The festival was reorganize in an effort to increase attendance and participation.
That ability to adapt as new leaders have stepped forward is one reason the festival has survived.
The Peach Festival has changed many times since 1951. It once ran nearly two weeks, with cookery contests, arts and crafts shows, baby crawl contests, pageants, rodeos, runs, car shows, fishing and sports tournaments, live music, children’s activities and food vendors. Some events have remained for decades, while others have come and gone.
The parade that trundled through downtown Ruston for decades was rerouted a couple of years ago to avoid the heart of the city completely. The traffic snarls involving a heavily-traveled U.S. highway had become too much. The new route from Louisiana Tech down Alabama Avenue and then north on Monroe Street to the I-20 Service Road keeps traffic moving. Rescheduling it to Friday evening before the festival’s big day also relieves congestion problems.
The festival also survived an unusual interruption in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic prevented Ruston from holding the traditional summer event for the first time since the festival began. Rather than allow the tradition to disappear, organizers created a smaller fall version known as “Peachtober.” It was different, but it kept the festival alive.
In recent years, the Louisiana Peach Festival has evolved into a downtown celebration of music, art, food and local culture. The modern festival emphasizes live music, a curated arts market, food vendors, children’s activities, and the homegrown flavor of Ruston. Its purpose remains close to the original idea: bring people to Ruston and give them something worth remembering.
The peaches are still the heart of the story.
They connect today’s festival crowds with the growers who first saw commercial promise in Lincoln Parish orchards. They connect downtown concerts with roadside stands, pageant crowns with packing sheds, and peach cobbler contests with the families who once measured summer by the fruit ripening on the trees.
A festival can last only if people continue to claim it as their own.
For more than seven decades, Ruston has done that. In years like this one that’s devoid of local peaches because of freezing weather, Ruston still pulls it off. Volunteers have planned events, raised money, sold T-shirts, directed traffic, judged contests, set up booths, cleaned streets and welcomed visitors. Local artists, musicians, churches, businesses, civic clubs and families have all played a part.
That may be the real sweetness of the Louisiana Peach Festival.
It began as a celebration of a crop, but it endured because it became a celebration of a community. The orchards gave Ruston the peach. The festival gave Ruston a tradition.
And each summer, when the first visitors arrive downtown and the familiar signs of Peach Festival weekend begin to appear, Ruston remembers once again that history can be served warm, with a scoop of ice cream on top.
