Under the cottonwoods at Lamoille Grove this past August, archers lined up for the Robin Hood Renaissance Faire's shooting range while a wood carver named Mike, working the Spoontree Emporium tent, blew a bugle to open the gates. Teen Miss Elko County Naidely Casique tried her hand at a bow. Kids in balloon-animal hats wandered past a booth of "potions" sold by Elko High School's Future Business Leaders of America. Somewhere in the same acreage, a stand of century-old trees stood marked for removal, part of a county project that has been quietly running in the background of the Grove's calendar for more than a year.
That's the part of the story most people at the Faire this year didn't have in front of them. Lamoille Grove is having its fullest fall in recent memory, with the Renaissance Faire behind it and the Everything Elko Pumpkin Festival still ahead. At the same time, more than 100 of the trees that gave the Grove its name and its shade are dying, and the county's plan to replace them has been unfolding in fits and starts since at least 2025. The two things are happening on the same ground, in the same season, and most visitors walking through one story have no idea they're standing inside the other.
A Grove That Has Always Been Defined by Its Shade
Lamoille Grove earned its place in local memory long before anyone organized a festival there. Local historian Jan Petersen has traced the site back to 1867, when Lamoille became known as a crossroads where a route across the valley met a road leading from Fort Halleck, meeting beneath a stand of stately cottonwoods near the Ruby Mountains. An 1875 Fourth of July grand ball was held there, the kind of event announced in the pages of the old Elko Independent with a general invitation extended to the whole community. Baseball games were played on the grounds by 1899. A Farm Bureau picnic gathered there in 1919, the same year locals floated a plan for tennis courts and camping sites that never got built.
The Grove reached its current footprint in 1924, when a resident named Charles Noble donated a plot of land to Elko County to expand the site. Elko County has managed the Grove since 1968, and the trees themselves have carried the weight of that history, providing the shade that made picnics, dances, and later, festivals possible in a high desert valley where open sun is the default. When Lamoille Highway was paved in 1947, the community marked the occasion with a three-day celebration and barbecue held right there under the same canopy.
That's the context worth holding onto: the Grove was never just a park. It was a shade structure first, and everything else, the dances, the ball games, the festivals, happened because the trees made it bearable to gather outdoors for a whole weekend.
The Trees Are Coming Down Faster Than the County Can Replace Them
County Commissioners Delmo Andreozzi and Rex Steninger have been overseeing a restoration effort because those same trees are now dying off, and Elko County is facing the job of removing more than 100 of them. Early estimates put the total cost of removal alone near $100,000. The county floated a "buy a tree" donation campaign, suggesting $1,000 gifts that would earn a name on a future plaque, with smaller donations welcomed too. A flyer with a QR code, produced through Key Marketing Solutions, has been circulating at the Grove and around Lamoille to funnel donations directly into what's been called The Grove Project.
The timeline the county laid out calls for a contractor to top off dead trees in summer, then have county crews finish the removal and grind the stumps, with the heavier work returning in winter when frozen ground limits damage to the grass. New trees aren't expected to go into the ground until spring.
As of a September 2025 county commission meeting, that plan still wasn't fully locked down. Resident Liz Todd pressed commissioners for a public timeline, citing safety concerns about falling trees, and a county staff member acknowledged there was no approved plan yet, only contractor quotes ranging from roughly $35,000 to $100,000 for removal. Commissioners talked about bringing in a landscape architect to design the replanting in a way that protects irrigation and keeps the space usable for community events.
Whether that plan got finalized in the year since, and whether the topping and removal it describes happened on schedule, is not something the public record answers as of this fall. What's clear is that the trees providing shade at this year's Faire and Pumpkin Festival are the same ones on that removal list, and the county's own schedule points to winter, after festival season ends, as the point when the heavier cutting picks back up.
What's Still Filling the Grove This Fall
None of that has slowed the calendar down. The Robin Hood Renaissance Faire, now in its fifth year since the Rotary Club of Elko started it in 2021, drew its usual mix of costumed visitors and vendors to Lamoille Grove on August 29 and 30 this year. This year's edition added a stage for the first time, a detail the Rotary Club highlighted ahead of the event. The lineup at the 2026 Faire included Friends in Service Helping and local Boy Scouts running booths, Spotted Tailgate Designs selling handmade bags, High Desert Witch Creations offering wooden trinkets, Mood Reads setting up a fantasy book display as part of Elko's Lace Collective, Beautiful Bling Now selling furs, and a Nuts Under a Buck donut truck feeding the crowd between an archery course and a bow-stringing demonstration. Admission has historically been priced low, at $1 a person or $5 for a family of five or more, with every dollar funneling back into Rotary's youth programs: a speech contest, local scholarships, dictionaries handed out to third graders, and sending Elko youth to RYLA leadership camp.
Next on the Grove's calendar is the Everything Elko Pumpkin Festival, which in recent years has landed on the second weekend of October, spreading across both Lamoille Grove and the neighboring Lamoille Womens Club yard. Past festivals have offered a pumpkin patch, craft and retail vendors, food trucks, hay rides, and a mini haunted house, with the first 500 kids through the patch each day receiving a free trick-or-treat bag sponsored by Kinross. It's a free event, open to the whole community, and it has run long enough that by 2023 organizers were already calling it the 11th annual.
Both events depend on exactly the kind of open, shaded ground that's now mid-transition. Neither the Faire nor the festival has been paused, scaled back, or relocated because of the tree removal. They're happening on schedule, in the same Grove, while the trees around them are partway through being replaced.
Watching a Place Change While It's Still in Use
There's something worth noticing in the fact that Lamoille Grove hasn't shut its gates to figure out its tree problem. The county is running the restoration in phases specifically so the space stays usable, timing the heaviest work for winter when there's no festival on the calendar and the grass can take the hit. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight, and it means the Grove residents visit each fall is quietly a different physical place than the one from two or three years ago, even as the events on its grounds look the same on a flyer.
Anyone who walked the Faire in August or plans to pick a pumpkin in October is seeing a version of the Grove that won't look identical next fall. The trees standing this year include some that are already marked, and the replacements won't be in the ground until spring at the earliest. It's a good year to notice which cottonwoods are still throwing shade, because that list is getting shorter on a schedule the county has already set.
Carla Bailey has spent her career building homes and relationships across Elko and Spring Creek, and she pays attention to the places that hold this community together, including the ones going through changes most people never see. If you've got a soft spot for Lamoille Grove, or you're simply curious about what's next for northern Nevada's small towns, reach out to Carla Bailey and schedule a free consultation. She's always glad to talk about the place she calls home.
