Moravia Races Bathtubs Again Aug. 8 at Fillmore Glen, Where Attendance Just Hit 121,860, Its Best Year Since 2011

Moravia will spend Saturday honoring the 13th president of the United States with a parade of bathtubs. Fillmore Days returns to Fillmore Glen State Park at 1686 Route 38 on Aug. 8, and the signature bathtub races roll after the 1 p.m. Parade of Tubs, all of it free to watch and all of it built on a 108-year-old newspaper lie about Millard Fillmore.

The Friends of Fillmore Glen State Park, the volunteer nonprofit that runs the festival, opens the gates at 10 a.m. A rubber duckie scavenger hunt starts at 10:15 a.m. Pedal car derbies begin at 11 a.m., first for ages 4 to 7, then for ages 6 to 10. The pie eating contest starts at noon with cash prizes for the top three finishers, and a game called cupcake checkers runs alongside it. After the races, the Witchy Women of the Finger Lakes take the stage, followed by the awards ceremony.

Entering costs less than a tank of gas. Racing teams that do not own a bathtub on wheels can rent one from the Friends group for $20 per team. Teams that bring their own compete in fiberglass, cast iron and custom classes. The pie eating contest costs $10 for ages 16 and up and $5 for ages 15 and under. Vendor booths start at $25. Entry forms are due Aug. 8, the day of the event, and day of registration is allowed while rental tubs last.

The rules read like they were written by someone who has watched a bathtub reach highway speed on a village hill. Drivers and riders must be at least 13 years old. Every tub must carry at least two riders at all times while moving. Two pushers are allowed per tub, and they must wear closed toe shoes. Helmets are strongly suggested. Crossing the yellow line disqualifies the tub for that heat, and every rental tub passes a safety inspection before anyone climbs in. Businesses are allowed to advertise on the sides of their bathtubs, which tells you how seriously local sponsors take this.

The lie that built a festival

The whole event rests on a hoax, and Moravia knows it. On Dec. 28, 1917, the journalist H.L. Mencken published a column called “A Neglected Anniversary” in the New York Evening Mail. It presented a fake history of the American bathtub, complete with invented names and dates. In Mencken’s telling, a Cincinnati merchant named Adam Thompson installed the first American tub, Vice President Millard Fillmore bathed in it in March 1850, and Fillmore ordered a bathtub for the White House once he became president that summer. None of it was true. Mencken admitted as much for decades, writing in 1949 that the piece “had, of course, no truth in it whatsoever,” and complaining that scarcely a month went by without the fabrication resurfacing somewhere in print as fact. The invention outran every correction. It landed in newspapers, official documents and reference books, and it eventually reached the one village in America that could turn it into a party.

Fillmore was real enough. He was born Jan. 7, 1800, in a log cabin in Summerhill, Cayuga County, roughly five miles from the park that now carries his name. He rose from what the University of Virginia’s Miller Center describes as desperate poverty, taught himself law, and climbed through New York politics to the vice presidency. He took the oath as the 13th president on July 10, 1850, after President Zachary Taylor died in office, and spent much of his single term backing the Compromise of 1850 in a failed effort to hold the country together. His own Whig Party dissolved during his tenure and never renominated him. He served until March 4, 1853, and died in 1874 in New York. Fillmore Glen State Park keeps a replica of his boyhood log cabin on the grounds, so the races run within walking distance of a copy of the cabin where the story starts.

Main Street, a crash, and a 20 year silence

The races themselves are older than most of the people pushing the tubs. For decades, teams rigged bathtubs with wheels and plungers for steering and sent them flying down Main Street in the village, with crowds lining the sidewalks. The village’s own account of the tradition says an accident involving a tub and a bystander ended the street races, and organizers shut the event down rather than risk a repeat. The bathtubs sat idle for about 20 years.

The revival came from the park side of town. The Friends of Fillmore Glen began in 2016 under the umbrella of the Cayuga-Owasco Lakes Historical Society and over the next three years secured standalone 501(c)(3) status and formal recognition as a Friends group by the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. Their first project, the statewide I Love My Park Day volunteer event in May 2016, drew 125 people to clear trails, paint, garden and build nest boxes. By the group’s own accounting, Fillmore Glen posted the highest volunteer turnout of any park in the Finger Lakes region for the first three years the event ran. When storm damage hit the park in July 2017, the group mobilized volunteers to help staff clear the grounds. Camper events, movie nights and lending libraries for games and books filled out the early calendar.

Then came the big swing. In August 2019 the Friends brought Fillmore Days and the bathtub races back, moved off the street and into the controlled setting of the state park. The Friends estimate 2,500 people attended that first revival, in a village of roughly 1,200. A Parks and Trails New York grant to grow the festival and the group’s membership followed in 2020, and a signage grant for trail kiosks and educational displays came in 2021. The group says the success of those applications pushed it toward longer range planning with the park manager on trail extensions, infrastructure repair and expanded programming.

The park is having its best stretch in over a decade

The festival’s home field is pulling bigger crowds than it has in years. Fillmore Glen State Park logged 121,860 visits in 2025, according to the state parks attendance dataset on data.ny.gov. That is the park’s highest annual count since 2011, when 130,874 people came through, and it caps a two year climb of 17 percent from the 104,083 visits recorded in 2023. The park drew 114,500 visits in 2024.

The longer arc makes the current run look even better. The state’s records for the park go back to 2003, when 100,982 people visited. Attendance peaked in the 2010 to 2012 stretch, topping 122,000 all three years, then fell off a cliff, hitting a modern low of 83,044 visits in 2014. From that floor, the park has rebuilt its audience by 47 percent in 11 years, and the last two years mark the first back to back gains above 114,000 since the peak. The Friends group revived the festival in 2019, right in the middle of that rebuild, and the park has averaged more than 112,000 visits per year since.

The draw is a 941 acre gorge park created in 1925 on the southern edge of the village, operated by the state parks office. Five waterfalls drop through the glen, including the Cowsheds, a shaded amphitheater of layered rock where, by local tradition, cattle once sheltered against the cliffs on hot days. The park runs 60 tent and trailer campsites, a gorge trail system, picnic pavilions and a stream fed swimming area behind a small dam, with snowmobiling and cross country skiing carrying it through the winter. The festival grounds sit at the field near the park entrance, and admission to Fillmore Days itself is free.

Saturday’s food lineup leans local. Food trucks The Friendly Falafel, The Sip Beverage Co., Curbside Cafe and Bearded Bear BBQ and Catering will sell all day, per The Citizen. The pie eating contest is only in its second year. It debuted at the 2025 festival on Aug. 9, where Connor Myers won the children’s division, and it returns Saturday with cash prizes on the line.

Teams still on the fence have until the gates close on their options. The Friends group takes mailed entries at PO Box 857 in Moravia and accepts walk up registration on the day of the event, though rental tubs go while supplies last. Costumes and removable tub decorations are encouraged, which in practice means the Parade of Tubs doubles as a costume contest with plumbing. Whether a rented tub gets to appear in the parade depends on how many rentals go out, a detail the group flags on its own registration page.

A village of 1,224 with three famous names

Moravia gives the festival its history the way the park gives it a venue. The village counted 1,224 residents in the 2020 census across 1.73 square miles, with the Owasco Inlet running through the middle of it on its way north to Owasco Lake. It was founded in 1789 by the Revolutionary War veteran John Stoyell under the name Owasco Flats, on land in the Central New York Military Tract, and incorporated as a village in 1837. Fillmore is the headliner, but he is not the only famous name on the roster. John D. Rockefeller spent part of his boyhood in the village. Andrew Dickson White, Cornell University’s first president, had family ties here. The Powers Library, built in 1880, is described by the village’s Wikipedia record as the oldest continuously used library building in New York. For one Saturday every August, the second Saturday by tradition, all of that history takes a back seat to plumbing fixtures on wheels.

The math for a family is simple. Watching is free. Racing a rented tub costs a team $20. Eating pie competitively costs $5 or $10 depending on age. The gates at 1686 Route 38 open at 10 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 8, and the first heat leaves right after the 1 p.m. Parade of Tubs.