Whitesboro's Peanut Festival Turns 60. What's Left of the Peanuts It Was Named For?

In October 1966, the first Whitesboro Peanut Festival opened with a late-afternoon parade from City Park on East Main Street. It ran through the business district and ended at the high school, and every entry had to carry a peanut theme. Sixty years later the parade still goes down Main Street on festival morning, and this year's theme still names the crop: "Peace, Love & Peanuts: Celebrating 60 Groovy Years." The peanut fields that made the theme obvious in 1966 are now rare around town. The festival has outlasted the farms it was built to celebrate, and the October parade is now the clearest place Whitesboro still shows its peanut years.

The first one ran three days and used half the town

The September 22, 1966 front page of the Whitesboro News-Record announced plans for the "first Peanut festival," a three-day event set for October 6 through 8. It also said what the festival replaced. Whitesboro had held an annual community fair at the high school every October, and the Peanut Festival took its place.

Gladys Judd, the general chairman, told the paper she expected record attendance and the biggest crowds on Saturday. That first festival spread across several buildings:

• Security National Bank held the flower show and the art show, open all three days. Flower entries were judged in divisions for holiday, dried and miniature arrangements, plus a humorous division with a sweepstakes prize.
• The high school gymnasium held the home economics show: breads, pies, canned fruits and vegetables, pickled okra, quilts, embroidery, ceramics and china painting.
• The high school football field was the planned site of the Saturday-night fiddlers' jubilee, with the gym as the backup if it rained. The Chamber mailed invitations to fiddlers across Texas and Oklahoma. Red Gordon of Gainesville was master of ceremonies, and six trophies went to the top fiddlers.
• The downtown sidewalks held a two-day sidewalk sale, with Whitesboro merchants moving their stock outside their storefronts on Friday and Saturday.

The town putting this on was growing. The Texas State Historical Association's Handbook of Texas entry on Whitesboro records 83 businesses in 1957 and about 100 by the late 1960s. A downtown sidewalk sale in 1966 had a lot of storefronts to fill.

Here is how the first festival compares with this year's, based on the 1966 newspaper and the 2026 Chamber listing.

In 1966 the festival was a community fair with homemade entries and judges' ribbons. It has since become a one-day downtown street festival built around vendors. The parade made the trip from one to the other.

Why the parade carries the history

The 1966 parade rule was easy to follow because peanuts were everywhere. KTEN's coverage of the 59th festival described the event as a nod to the farmers who brought their peanuts into downtown, and to the local story that those farmers started the first businesses on Main Street. That is local lore rather than a documented list of businesses. Still, it explains why a peanut parade would run down Main Street in particular.

This year's grand marshal is Hank Lovejoy, and the parade is sponsored by Legend Bank and I-35 Trailer Store of Texas. The Chamber's announcement, as reported by the Herald Democrat on September 2, called him "a true Whitesboro legend, icon, and hometown staple" who "has been a familiar face and special part of this community for generations."

Choosing a grand marshal for being a familiar face fits a festival whose main subject is now the town itself. The peanut is still in the theme. The person leading the parade was chosen for his ties to the people who live here.

Where the peanuts went

A KTEN report, Grayson Co. Farmer Still Planting Peanuts, lays out what happened to the crop. The page shows no publication date, so its numbers describe the moment it was reported, not this fall. The Whitesboro Chamber of Commerce president interviewed at the time described the town she grew up in:

"When I was a young girl growing up in Whitesboro, I went to school here, the area all around us was peanut farms, that was our main crop here."

The report's central figure, a Collinsville farmer, grew hundreds of acres of peanuts when he started out. His father had planted them in the years after World War II. Peanut prices used to be regulated through government quotas, and he sold his quota allotment in 1997. Once the quota system ended, he told KTEN, prices fell to around $300 a ton, which he said was too low to grow them at a profit.

He went a decade without peanuts, then planted 22 acres, a small fraction of the hundreds he once farmed. He sold that crop to a company in Madill, Oklahoma. His main crop had become hay, and the report says most of his time went to baling hay for horse farms.

That last detail describes Whitesboro's farmland today. Ground around town that once grew peanuts is cut for hay and fed to horses. The economics behind the change are the ones the report describes: when quota-era prices disappeared, the farm math stopped working for most growers.

The festival never needed the crop to keep going. Without a single local peanut sheller still attached to it, the Chamber has run it every October up to the 60th. Its name is now one of the few things that still connects Main Street to the fields.

What October 17 actually looks like

The Whitesboro Area Chamber of Commerce festival page lists the 2026 lineup:

• Over 300 booths and displays
• Entertainment stages
• A parade, with prizes for float entries
• Kid alley
• Food court
• Car show
• Free park-and-ride
• No gate charge

The Herald Democrat added a carnival and a petting zoo, and reported that the vendor area was already 80 percent full weeks before the festival. The paper also laid out the order of the day: the parade first, then the car show and vendor fair.

The Chamber has not posted this year's hour-by-hour schedule or the park-and-ride location on its festival page, and it points people to its Facebook page for the latest announcements. For a sense of timing, here is how the 58th festival ran in October 2024, according to the Herald Democrat's preview. This is the 2024 schedule, not a confirmed 2026 one:

1. 8 a.m. Festival opens in the center of downtown
2. 9 a.m. Maxwell's Taekwondo on the Main Stage
3. 9:30 a.m. Mayor's welcome, then the invocation
4. 10 a.m. Parade, featuring the Pride of Whitesboro Marching Band
5. 10:30 a.m. The Ranch Performance, followed by the Whitesboro High School Band
6. 12:30 p.m. and 2:15 p.m. Blackout Betty
7. 3 p.m. Truck raffle

In 2024 the carnival ran three nights, Thursday through Saturday, with $30 wristbands. Carnival parking was in the open field north of the lot behind Tender BBQ, formerly Dickey's, and organizers asked drivers to watch closely when turning on and off Highway 377 because of heavy foot traffic. The 2026 carnival has been announced, but its nights and prices have not been confirmed in what the Chamber has published so far.

The three-night carnival is the closest thing left to the three-day festival of 1966. It starts before Saturday, runs on the edge of town by the highway, and fills the evenings the way the fiddlers' jubilee did on the first festival's last night. In 1966 the Chamber mailed letters to fiddlers across two states. This year it filled 80 percent of its booths weeks early with the same date on the calendar: a Saturday in mid-October, on Main Street.

Much of the land that once grew Whitesboro's peanuts now grows hay for horses, and land like that is what Lisa Marie Bricker knows best: pasture and hay ground, along with the barns, fencing and acreage that come with them, across North Texas horse country. If you're thinking about what your Grayson County acreage could become next, or what it's worth as it stands, schedule a consultation.