Alberton Railroad Day Festival

At eight in the morning on the third Saturday in July, the Alberton Seniors start the griddles at the Community Center on Railroad Avenue. The building is the Milwaukee Road depot of 1908. A National Register survey names it the major structure the railroad left standing, and it now houses the town library as well. At the 2026 festival, the 41st, the pancake breakfast cost $5 and ran until 11:00. “The Alberton Seniors are slinging those pancakes!” the festival posted that morning.

Railroad Day is put on by the Alberton Community Volunteers. The town’s own website notes that the Town of Alberton does not organize it. The grounds are at Hank Roat Memorial Park, off Interstate 90 at Exit 77, in the Clark Fork valley at the southern tip of Mineral County, 3,055 feet above sea level.

Dunk tank, hotdogs, and bear dogs

Vendors and activities open at 9. In 2026 the Frenchtown Rural Fire Department brought a dunk tank. Bitterroot Bouncers set up bounce houses and sports shootouts, Malek Magic worked the crowd, and the American Legion ran gem panning. Alberton Bear Smart was also on the program. Food and drink came all day from Lemon Drum, Clark Fork & Spoon Kitchen, Colt + Rylen’s, the Ridge Runners Club, the Methodist Church, and Deb’s Bread Box.

The Ridge Runners have been at it a while. In 2023 the Mineral Independent found 11-year-old Bess Baker helping her father, Russ, sell grilled hotdogs for the Alberton Ridge Runners Saddle Club, which uses the money to hold an Easter egg hunt each year. Asked about her horse, Suki, a 15-year-old Paint, she said: “She likes doing barrels.” The same year Linda Romano, a member of the Catholic Church, noted it was the first Railroad Day the church had not sold pies. “Well, the Catholic Church is kind of shut down and we are going to Frenchtown church, now,” she said. “But the Methodist Church is doing great and they are down there selling tacos, I think.”

Residents sell their own work along the vendor rows. KPAX reported on Hayden Bean, who sells handmade fishing lures. “So for my tenth birthday, I got like a fishing lure kinda making kit and from there I just started making them,” he said.

In 2023 the vendors’ row was set on the grass behind the Senior Center. The children’s area there had a couple of wading pools, a bouncy house, croquet, corn hole, and a large checkerboard with sliding chips. The Wind River Bear Institute, which raises and trains Karelian bear dogs in Florence, showed how the dogs work nuisance bears and mountain lions. “We have done over 1,000 grizzly bear pushes in a year and no dog, human or bear has been injured or killed in the process,” said Jessica Reyes, the institute’s program biologist. The Big Sky Passenger Rail Authority has kept a table too. That year its Mineral County director, Diane Magone, explained a proposed passenger route across southern Montana that might come through Mineral County, with a suggested stop in Paradise.

A parade you see twice

The parade rolls at 11. For 2026 it ran down Parkway Drive, lining up at 10:30 at the football field, facing west. The festival invited “floats, wagons, hot rods, antiques, horses, well-behaved dogs in bandanas,” with no registration required.

For years the route was Railroad Avenue. The parade started at the west end, went east through town, turned around, and came back. In 2011 the turnaround made it a two-lane march for a while. In 2018 the return leg started too soon, and the head of the parade caught up with its own tail on the east end, which caused some minor confusion. The festival’s own description calls it “a parade so nice, you see it twice.” In 2023 it did its about-face at the skatepark.

Kids line the street for thrown candy. In 2023 Ron Mason and Linda Romano went after it themselves. Mason came out from New York City for college, has lived in Alberton since 1983, and was a timber forester for the Superior Ranger District. He doesn’t remember missing a Railroad Day. “I just like walking around seeing people I know,” he said. “Coming and visiting with people you haven’t seen since Railroad Day last year.”

Past parades have carried horses, fire trucks, cheerleaders, and Smokey Bear. Entries in 2011 came from the Frenchtown Fire Department, the Nine Mile Forest Service, American Legion Post #27, River Edge Resort, Alberton Feed and Supply, and Superior’s Lions Club. In 2018 Jessie Vaillancourt rode the Alberton Feed Store float as a chicken, with a wagon full of chicks.

Music at Sporty’s and Trax, and Mayor Jimmy

The festival counted twelve hours of live music in 2026. Jazzoula played at the river’s edge from noon to 4. Cahoot’s Band played at Sporty’s from 6:30 to 10:30, and the Northern Lights Band played at Trax from 8 to midnight. Earlier lineups had other names. Texas Tom headlined in 2011. In 2018 the Old Time Fiddlers, Louie Bond, Bankshot, DJ Jacob’s Ladder, and an 80’s Dance Party filled the bars and the Community Center. The festival has also included a car show and yard sales.

The shootout began in 2011. John Zunski, owner of the Sportsman’s Tavern, thought up a western skit the Tuesday before Railroad Day. He cast himself as the villain, in a black jacket and a fake mustache, and was brought to justice and shot in front of his tavern while onlookers gathered at the sound of fake gunfire. By 2018 the show ran in two parts, at noon and at 4 p.m., as a dark parody of The Bachelorette. Its characters included Loretta “High Cheeks” Hoolihan, Honey Bucket Hank, and Mayor Jimmy, played by Zunski, with his trusty steed, Stewie. Matt Sibert narrated. The 2023 paper still reported a shootout in the street.

A division point on the Clark Fork

The hunt for the spike recalls what the street once was. Before the railroad, Fran Rogers of the Alberton Historical Museum told the paper in 2011, the place was just a sheep field. The homesteads belonged to Henry Brown and Charles Poirier. The station was first called Browntown. In 1907 the Milwaukee Road bought 480 acres from Brown for a division point and built a depot, a roundhouse, offices, and crew housing. The depot had a railroad-owned restaurant known as the “Beanery.” On July 19, 1909, the Missoulian reported that the first regular passenger train from Butte had arrived on time.

The town was named for Albert J. Earling, president of the Milwaukee Road. Local legend also links the name to an early settler, Alexander Albert. At its peak in 1916, about 400 to 500 people lived in or near town, and the railroad employed between 100 and 150 men in its yards. Electrification of the line, completed by early 1917, ended the need for locomotive maintenance at Alberton. The roundhouse and shops were removed, about two-thirds of the railroad workers lost their jobs, and by 1920 the population was 278. “Basically everyone that lived here worked for the railroad,” Rogers said.

Accounts of the end differ. The 2011 article says the Milwaukee Road abandoned the line in Alberton in 1980. The town’s history page says the trains stopped running in 1986. After that the tracks were torn up from Railroad Avenue. The concrete pillar once used to turn boxcars can still be seen. At the town museum a visitor can touch a yellow-and-orange Milwaukee boxcar and sit in a caboose.

The Street Dance and after

The festival’s beginnings are told several ways. Romano, who came to Alberton 50 years before the 2023 festival and started its kindergarten program, put it this way: “This started in 1985. Before that, it was called the Street Dance and the Street Dance got out of control, crazy. So now it’s Railroad Day and a nice family event.” The 2011 article credits the local sportsman club with starting Railroad Day to preserve the town’s railroad history. In those days Railroad Avenue was blocked off for a street dance and hosed down afterward. A 2018 article gives the first purpose as raising money for the volunteer fire department. A separate record says residents also turned a rail car and caboose into a railroad museum.

Richard Werst, who chaired the Alberton Community Foundation’s event committee in 2011, called the early years wild times. That year the foundation added a 5-K run at 7 a.m. to bring whole families in. “You forget what small town Montana really was,” Werst said. “This is one step towards getting that back.” An all-class Alberton High School reunion fell on the same weekend that year. Nearly 100 graduates came. Among them was Lester Cyr, class of 1955, who remembered playing six-man football and living up Fish Creek before there was a drivable road. In 2017 the Alberton Railroad Foundation Committee said it hoped to keep the town celebration going and to raise money for community improvement projects.

“The railroad built this town,” Rogers said in 2011. “That’s why we have Railroad Day, to remember it’s a railroad town.” She had run the town museum, and in 2018, not long after her death, the Golden Spike hunt was held in her memory. That year the spike was hidden near the display train in front of the Senior/Community Center. Nobody found it, and the $100 was added to the next year’s prize.