Peach Days or Dixie Days: what is the difference?

Washington County has two significant community festivals in September, nine days apart, in two towns that are genuinely different from one another.

If you are new here — or scouting a move — the two of them together are close to a perfect introduction to the county, because they show you the difference between Hurricane and St. George more clearly than any description could.

The basics

	Peach Days	Dixie Days
Where	Hurricane	St. George
2026 dates	September 3–5	September 12–20
Length	Three main days	A full week
This year	28th annual	3rd annual
Rooted in	Orchard and harvest history	Pioneer and community heritage
Rodeo	Nightly at 7 p.m.	Dixie Roundup, three nights
Admission	Free	Mostly free

What Peach Days is

A small town’s harvest festival that grew into its biggest weekend.

Peach Days is built on Hurricane’s actual agricultural history — this part of the county grew peaches, and still does. The 2026 theme is “Patriotic Peach Days,” marking America’s 250th birthday.

The weekend runs on a parade, a nightly rodeo, a carnival, a quilt show, a peach cook-off, a fun run, canal treks and fireworks. Saturday is the center of it.

The feel is unmistakably small-town. Family reunions are on the official schedule, which tells you most of what you need to know — people come back for this.

What Dixie Days is

A young festival built around some considerably older traditions, at city scale.

Dixie Days runs nine days and spreads across downtown St. George. It includes the Dixie Roundup Rodeo — a PRCA-sanctioned professional rodeo at the Historic Dixie Sunbowl — plus Dinner on Main with the street closed, a carnival at Town Square, a concert and drone show at Vernon Worthen Park, historical treks, an exhibit at the St. George Tabernacle, a parade and a dash.

It is bigger, longer, and more varied. It is also newer as a festival, even though the rodeo at its center is not.

The honest comparison

Peach Days is more intimate. You will run into the same people twice. The scale is a town, not a city.

Dixie Days has more range. Nine days with a professional rodeo, a drone show and a historical exhibit is a different proposition from three days with a carnival and a cook-off.

Peach Days is older as a festival. Twenty-eighth annual versus third. That shows in how settled it feels.

Dixie Days has the bigger rodeo. PRCA-sanctioned, professional circuit competitors. The Peach Days rodeo is the community version, and plenty of people prefer it for exactly that reason.

Neither is better. They are the same instinct expressed at two different scales.

Which one to go to if you only pick one

If you want to understand Hurricane, go to Peach Days. Specifically go to the parade on Saturday and the rodeo one evening.

If you want to understand St. George, go to Dixie Days, and go to Dinner on Main. Main Street closed with people eating outside tells you more about that city than any other two hours available.

If you are deciding between the two towns — and a great many people moving here are — go to both. They are nine days apart, and seeing them back to back is genuinely the clearest way to feel the difference between a town of Hurricane’s size and a small city.

That difference is the whole decision for a lot of buyers, and it is far easier to feel than to read about. The Hurricane versus St. George question usually gets framed around price and lot size. It is really about this.

If you can only come for one weekend

This comes up often enough to answer directly, and the answer depends on what you are actually trying to learn.

If you are early in the process and just want to feel the county, come for Dixie Days. It is longer, so a weekend inside it gives you more options, and St. George is the logical base for exploring the whole area anyway.

If you have narrowed to Hurricane versus St. George, come for Peach Days and stay through. It is the smaller of the two towns and the harder one to read from the outside — three days of it will tell you whether the scale suits you. St. George you can assess on an ordinary weekday.

If you are bringing children, both work, and the carnival at each is the draw. Peach Days is more contained, which is easier with small children.

If you are coming to look at houses rather than festivals, come between them. The week of September 6 through 11 sits in the gap, the weather is the same, and you will see both towns doing what they normally do — which is far more useful for a buying decision than either festival.

That last option is the one I recommend most and the one people pick least.

What both of them hide

The same thing, and it is worth saying twice.

September in Washington County is lovely. Both of these festivals sit at the front end of the good stretch, with pleasant evenings and everything open and everyone out.

That is a genuinely misleading impression of the year. Summer here is the part you plan around, and a perfect September evening at a festival tells you nothing about July.

If you are scouting a move, come to a festival and come on an ordinary hot week. I say this constantly and I will keep saying it, because the people who regret moving here almost all visited only in the flattering months.

Planning a visit around both

If you can manage roughly two weeks in early to mid September, you get Peach Days at the start, Dixie Days at the end, and a normal week in the middle.

That middle week is the valuable part. Drive the neighborhoods on a Tuesday morning. See a school run. Sit in what passes for traffic here. Do the ordinary things you would actually be doing.

The festivals show you the community. The Tuesday shows you the life.

What to do next

Peach Days is September 3 to 5 in Hurricane. Dixie Days is September 12 to 20 in St. George. Both are largely free, and both are worth your time.

Check the City of Hurricane and the City of St. George for current schedules — times move as the dates approach. Santa Clara closes out the month a couple of weeks later with its own heritage festival, and what is Santa Clara Swiss Days covers that one.

And if you are using these as part of working out where to live, tell me when you are coming and what you are trying to decide. I would rather help you see the county honestly than let two very good weekends do the persuading. If you are earlier than that, start with the city question.

— Kelsey Earl, Realtor, Keller Williams South Valley