Oneida County Idaho Malad Valley Welsh Festival
The Malad Valley Welsh Festival celebrates the Welsh pioneer heritage of Malad City in Oneida County, Idaho, where Welsh settlers shaped the valley’s churches, farms and family names. In recent form it filled a late-June weekend across Malad City Park, the 2nd Ward Church, downtown venues and a heritage site in Samaria. Poetry contests settled by the Chairing of the Bard, Welsh food, harp and choral music, quilt displays and wagon tours give it its shape. The festival now faces a documented change of home and season: the organiser’s current pages place the next edition at Malad Valley Heritage Square in Samaria on 18 to 19 September 2026, under the announced going-forward name Malad Valley Welsh Festival at Heritage Square. Admission is documented as free, and the modern record reaches back to a first festival dated 2004 or 2005, the layers disagreeing.
About the Malad Valley Welsh Festival
Malad City, the Oneida County seat as the city’s own official website states, was the festival’s main host through the Malad City Park years. Samaria is not the county seat, yet activities have always reached there, and from 2026 the whole event moves there.
The organising bodies are printed under different names in different layers, kept separate here. Local news from November 2025 says the festival has operated under the Malad Valley Welsh Foundation, a nonprofit organisation, and that a Welsh Festival Executive Committee acted jointly with the Heritage Square Committee on the move. The same reporting says the Heritage Square Committee, chaired by Luke Waldron, will take over planning and organising, the festival operating as an event under the Heritage Square Foundation, also a nonprofit. A May 2025 news history instead speaks of the founding of the Malad Valley Welsh Society in 2005; Society and Foundation are distinct printed names, neither treated here as a renaming of the other. Jean Thomas served as co-chair for two years and chair for eighteen years before Waldron succeeded her.
Quick Facts
| Item | Detail |
| Published name | Malad Valley Welsh Festival |
| Host community | Malad City, the Oneida County seat, with activities in Samaria |
| Organising bodies | Malad Valley Welsh Foundation, with the Heritage Square Committee taking over planning |
| Venues | Malad City Park, the 2nd Ward Church, downtown Malad and Malad Valley Heritage Square in Samaria |
| Documented editions | Late June in 2018, 2023, 2024 and 2025; September 2026 listed for Samaria |
| Billing | Nineteenth Annual in 2025, as billed by the state listing and local news |
| Admission | Free to the public, per the State of Idaho listing for 2025 |
| Signature elements | Chairing of the Bard, poetry contests, a Taste of Wales food booth, amphitheater music |
| Attendance record | No counted figure for a recent edition; a directory lists one thousand |
| Going-forward name | Malad Valley Welsh Festival at Heritage Square |
History
Long before the modern festival, Malad Valley sustained a pioneer eisteddfod tradition, the Welsh competitive gathering of poetry and music, running from the eighteen eighties until 1916, the First World War era. That tradition is background, not an early edition: the organiser’s History page says in 2005, after a ninety-year break, the festival became a reality.
The starting year is genuinely unsettled in print. The organiser’s About page states that in 2004 the annual festival was established, and that page itself credits an encyclopaedia as its source. Against it, the History page gives 2005, November 2025 local news says the festival began in 2005 with no budget, a dozen activities and lots of volunteers, and a 2018 interview with Jean Thomas puts the first festival in 2005, planned by twenty citizens in about six months. Both years stand here as their layers print them.
For a useful comparison, see the Nez Perce County Idaho Hot August Nights Festival for another county festival.
The edition numbering carries its own explanation. The organiser’s archive page billed 2018 as the Fourteenth Annual, local news billed 2024 as the Eighteenth, and the state listing and local news billed 2025 as the Nineteenth Annual. November 2025 reporting explains why the count runs behind the calendar: the festival was cancelled in 2020 during the pandemic, and in 2021 it shrank to an adult poetry competition and reading held mostly over Zoom, so 2025 was touted as the nineteenth because it has not been an annual event. Headlines spoke of one hundred and sixty years of Malad’s heritage in 2024, one hundred and sixty-one in 2025; those figures belong to the town, never the festival’s age. Poetry competitions joined the modern festival in 2017, per local news.
What to Expect
The 2025 edition, running 27 to 29 June under the theme Castles, shows the festival’s full range. Two speakers’ presentations sat alongside youth art displays depicting scenes of Wales, family history displays covering more than thirty Welsh pioneer families, and a photographic journey called A Walk Through Wales. The Youth and Adult Poetry contests ended in the Chairing of the Bard, an Adult fiction competition ran beside them, and students and adults read original poetry. Music filled the park amphitheater from acts including Finch and the Magpies, The Idaho Rovers, Bards and Nobles, harpists and The Haywire Ranch String Band, while a Sunday presentation recalled growing up in Malad in the nineteen forties and fifties.
The 2024 edition, themed The Welsh Dragon: A Symbol for a Nation, opened with a ceremony presided over by the 2023 Bard, the Knight of the Festival leading past Bards in, and closed with the adult Bard chaired at the finale and the Patsy Price Scott Poetry Prize awarded. It held youth and piano ensemble concerts, the Malad Valley Welsh Men’s Chorus, a Welsh language class, heritage games such as stick-pulling and stilt walking, and a scavenger hunt at Heritage Square. One 2024 item stands apart: a one-day display of a model of the USS Idaho submarine, which the news layer itself notes has little to do with Wales, a one-off rather than a tradition.
Planning Your Visit
Planning starts with the change of address and season. Every documented edition from 2018 through 2025 sat in late June, spread between Malad City Park, the 2nd Ward Church with its chapel and cultural hall, the park amphitheater, the Co-op building, the Malad Presbyterian Church, the Oneida Pioneer Museum and the library downtown, and Malad Valley Heritage Square in Samaria. One 2025 layer calls the Samaria site Heritage Park while most layers print Malad Valley Heritage Square or Heritage Square; both forms refer to the Samaria ground, the difference recorded rather than resolved. From 2026 the festival consolidates there on 18 to 19 September.
Admission is the simplest part of the record. The State of Idaho listing for 2025 states the event is free to the public and shows the ticket price as zero, local news in 2024 and 2025 confirms all presentations are free, and November 2025 reporting says the Heritage Square festival will continue not charging admission, part-funded by a large donation from past festival proceeds. Charges attach only to components, never to entry: food is sold at the Taste of Wales booth, goods at the bake sale and Country Store, vendor fees were named as a funding source in 2025, and the Dragon Half- and Quarter-Marathon races ran in 2024 as fundraisers sponsored by the Malad High School Cross Country Team, with no race price in the layers opened.
The 2026 move also trims the programme. The Youth Poetry Competition will not be held in 2026, though the Adult Poetry Competition will, and events once held in the church beside the park, youth poetry, youth, piano-ensemble and choral concerts, family history displays and Walk Through Wales presentations cannot transfer because Heritage Square lacks a large auditorium-like space.
A Weekend at the Festival: The 2025 Shape
This itinerary follows the documented shape of the 2025 edition in Malad City, Friday 27 June through Sunday 29 June, showing the park years’ arrangement.
Friday belonged to the park and the church beside it. A visitor could start among the family history displays covering more than thirty Welsh pioneer families, move to the youth poetry reading and readings by students and adults, then take a wagon tour of historic Malad City sites.
Saturday widened the circuit. The quilt show, bake sale, Country Store, Taste of Wales booth and food and craft vendors traded through the day, while heritage games and kids’ activities ran on the grass. Tours of Heritage Square and the Malad Presbyterian Church took visitors beyond the park, and the Adult Poetry contest built toward the Chairing of the Bard.
Sunday narrowed to one evening programme: the presentation on growing up in Malad in the nineteen forties and fifties, in the spirit of the fireside that closed the 2024 edition on Sunday 30 June.
The Park Years and the Heritage Square Years
Set side by side, the two settings explain the festival’s next step. The Malad City Park arrangement was dispersed by design: a park, an adjacent church with a chapel and cultural hall, a Co-op building for quilts, a museum and a Presbyterian church downtown, and a second site in Samaria all shared one weekend. The Heritage Square arrangement gathers everything onto one historic ground of cabins in Samaria, and the planned 2026 programme leans into that setting: Welsh language in the John Jones Williams Cabin, Welsh folklore in the Samuel Deer Davis Cabin, a Welsh Kitchen serving Welsh cakes, bara brith and cawl, and a Coal Mining Exhibit among the cabins.
The trade is visible in the record. What the single site gains in atmosphere it loses in capacity: the youth poetry contest and the church-housed concerts and displays fall away in 2026, while music and poetry continue on a smaller scale.
A Checklist for Festival Visitors
- Confirm which venue a session uses, since the park years spread events between the park, the 2nd Ward Church, downtown rooms and Samaria
- Keep the Samaria dates apart from the June pattern: 18 to 19 September 2026 at Malad Valley Heritage Square
- Bring money only for components such as Taste of Wales food, the bake sale and the Country Store; admission and presentations are free
- Check whether a favourite element survived the move, because the Youth Poetry Competition is not held in 2026
- Allow travel time between Malad City and Samaria, a separate community southwest of town
- Treat the one thousand attendance figure as a directory claim rather than a counted crowd
Beyond the Festival Grounds
The festival’s geography reaches beyond one ground. Downtown Malad holds the Oneida Pioneer Museum and the Malad Presbyterian Church, both woven into festival weekends. Samaria Days and the Fall/Heritage Harvest Festival also take place at Malad Valley Heritage Square; sharing a venue, and even sharing organisers such as Luke Waldron, does not merge their programmes with the Welsh festival’s. Malad City’s Cowboy Poetry and Western Music Festival and the Oneida County Fair and Rodeo in August are likewise separate fixtures in the same valley.
Why This Festival Matters
Few American festivals rest on so specific an inheritance. This one revives, in documented modern form, a competitive Welsh tradition the pioneers carried from the eighteen eighties to 1916, and its centrepieces, the poetry contests and the Chairing of the Bard, keep that inheritance active rather than merely commemorated. The volunteer labour is part of the record: thirty-six committee chairs and over one hundred volunteers were counted in 2025, alongside nearly forty events and activities across two days, and Jean Thomas alone gave two years as co-chair and eighteen as chair. The move to Heritage Square, funded in part by a large donation from past proceeds, shows a festival spending accumulated goodwill to secure a permanent home, even at the cost of programme elements that cannot fit the new ground.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do the layers give two different years for the first modern festival?
Because the organiser’s own pages disagree. The About page states the festival was established in 2004 and credits an encyclopaedia as its source, while the History page, local news and a 2018 interview with the chair all place the first festival in 2005, so both years stay visible here.
Which parts of a festival weekend carry charges of their own?
Entry and presentations are documented as free, so charges sit in the components: food sold at the Taste of Wales booth, goods at the bake sale and the Country Store, vendor fees, and the 2024 Dragon races run as school fundraisers, for which no price appeared in the layers opened.
What changes when the festival moves to Samaria in 2026?
The whole festival gathers at Malad Valley Heritage Square on 18 to 19 September 2026, under the Heritage Square Committee and the announced name Malad Valley Welsh Festival at Heritage Square. The Youth Poetry Competition drops away, the Adult Poetry Competition remains, and the church-housed concerts and displays cannot be held because the site lacks a large auditorium-like space.
How large is the crowd the festival draws?
No layer counts a recent crowd. The figures that exist are of other kinds: Jean Thomas recalled in 2018 that the first festival in 2005 attracted about five hundred people, and an undated directory lists reported attendance of one thousand, a listing claim rather than a counted figure.
What to Expect From the Next Oneida County Idaho Malad Valley Welsh Festival
How often is Oneida County Idaho Malad Valley Welsh Festival held?
Editions cluster in late June in 2018, 2023, 2024 and 2025, but the numbering warns against assuming an unbroken yearly run: local news explains the Nineteenth Annual billing in 2025 by citing the cancelled 2020 festival and the reduced Zoom-based poetry event of 2021.
When is the next Oneida County Idaho Malad Valley Welsh Festival?
The organiser’s current website lists the next edition for 18 to 19 September 2026 at Malad Valley Heritage Square in Samaria, under the going-forward name Malad Valley Welsh Festival at Heritage Square. One tension stays open: November 2025 news described the new pattern as a one-day Saturday event, the third Saturday in September, perhaps with a Friday kick-off and a Sunday fireside, while the organiser’s site now lists two full days.
Will the dates change?
They already have. After years of late-June weekends in Malad City, the festival shifts to mid-September in Samaria for 2026, and the one-day pattern in November 2025 news against the two days now listed shows it is still settling.
Closing
The festival leaves its June park years with its record unusually candid: a founding year argued between its own pages, a billing explained by a cancellation and a Zoom year, and a move to Samaria that trades a church hall’s capacity for the cabins of Heritage Square. The core carries across unchanged: Welsh poetry crowned by the Chairing of the Bard, Welsh food, music and the family history of more than thirty pioneer families, offered free to whoever comes.
