Orange City prepares for 83rd Tulip Festival

ORANGE CITY, Iowa (KCAU) – Orange City’s Tulip Festival , starts next week and residents are getting ready to celebrate the town’s Dutch heritage.

For more than 80 years, Orange City has showcased the beauty of Dutch culture with activities everyone can enjoy.

“Kids from two years old all the way to in their 90s, everybody loves the Tulip Festival,” executive planning committee member Jennie Droog said. “[Everybody] gets excited about it, gets excited to share our town and our heritage with visitors from all over the globe.”

Orange City is busy preparing for its 83rd annual Tulip Festival to honor the background of the city’s founders.

“Not only is it a chance to share our Dutch heritage with visitors, but it’s also a chance for our community to come together, to spend time together, to celebrate what made us way back when, but also what we’ve grown into today,” Droog said.

The festival will be filled with dancing, parades, and trolley rides with a cultural significance that’s a little closer to home.

“Horse-drawn trolleys have a tradition in Iowa that we’re still trying to hang on to,” executive committee advisory member John Weber said. “There’s not many people anymore that still use horses, but back in the 20’s, 30s’, and 40’s with farming, horses were popular to plow the fields and till the fields.”

Built in 1987, festival committee members have been working hard this winter to keep the two trolleys looking nice and new for the 2024 festival.

“The foundation of them is pretty good,” Weber said. “Just needed some touch-up and some tender love and care to get them back to looking good again.”

Whether it’s a trolley ride or tulip talk, the Tulip Festival truly has something for everyone.

“Whether you’re here with your family and want to enjoy the carnival rides and the food and the parades, or whether you’re here to see our wonderful night show musical or take in the authentic dutch costumes,” [there’s] just so many, a wide varieties of activities,” Droog said.

Tulip festivities begin with the Cruise-In Car show Wednesday, May 15 at 4:30 p.m.

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