Blackberry Festival & Classic Car Show

Juliaetta Centennial Park lies just south of downtown on State Highway 3, in Latah County, Idaho, where the Potlatch River runs between hills. On festival Saturday in September the baseball field fills with classic cars, trucks, motorcycles and tractors of any make and model year. Owners register at the field that morning. Photographs from earlier festivals show a restored purple 1937 Oldsmobile, a red Impala with a red interior parked beside a bright green custom hot rod, rat rods and old trucks in a row, and convertibles lined up with the hills behind them. Admission is free.

Chrome, blackberries and a gazebo

The vendor market opens at 8:00 in the morning across the park, with booths set up under the shade trees. Artisan vendors sell hand-crafted goods. Local food makers sell blackberry-inspired foods and drinks, and the organizers list cold lemonade among the day’s offerings. There are games for children. At 10:00 The Backroad Jammers begin playing at the gazebo.

At 11:00 the dachshund races are run on the softball field. Volunteers organize the races and set them up, and the organizers’ own announcements sometimes call them the Weiner dog races. After the 2026 festival the organizers thanked “all of the enthusiastic dogs and their owners who took part.”

At 3:00 in the afternoon the crowd returns to the gazebo for the car show awards, with trophies given in several categories, and for the raffle drawing. Zane Hadley made the trophies for 2026. That year the raffle included a meat raffle donated by Bud’s Butcher Shop, which the organizers described as “just shy of 30 pounds.”

Pies and the JCIA

The Juliaetta Community Improvement Association puts on the festival. It is a volunteer non-profit that meets at 7:00 PM on the first Thursday of each month at the Juliaetta Community Center on State Street. A person becomes a member by attending three meetings and being voted in by the existing membership. No application is required.

Money raised at the festival pays for the association’s work in town. It donates to the J-K Ambulance, the KJ7 Newsletter and the Juliaetta Food Bank. It hangs Christmas lights in Centennial Park each holiday season. It is also replacing the fence at the Juliaetta Cemetery with a new one made locally. In March 2026 its volunteers picked up litter along Highway 3. After the 2026 festival the association thanked the volunteers “who donated their time, pies, energy, and talents before, during, and after the festival.”

Schupferville, the railroad and the park

The town around the park began in 1878, when the early settler Rupert Schupfer platted half of his homestead as a townsite, according to an IDAHO magazine spotlight on Juliaetta by Sheila Petticord. Charles Snyder acquired the land next to Schupfer’s and set up a post office, which he named for his daughters, Julia and Etta. For a time the place was called Schupfer or Schupferville. The community settled on Juliaetta in 1890, the same year a tramway was built to carry grain down the hill to the railway. The railroad arrived the next year, and the town was incorporated in 1892. By 1902 the Northern Pacific stopped in Juliaetta four times a day.

The town’s population passed nine hundred in the years after 1903. In that year Dr. Robert Foster arrived and opened what became Foster’s School of Healing, and hundreds of people came to Juliaetta for treatment. Foster left for Clarkston, Washington, in December 1911. After his departure most of the town’s businesses died, and by 1930 many of its buildings had burned. The magazine reports a rumor that some were burned for the insurance.

The railroad line was abandoned in 1997 and paved as the Ed Corkill Memorial River Trail. It begins at a pond by the park entrance and follows the Potlatch River to Kendrick. TrailLink gives its length as 5.3 miles, and the city gives it as nearly 5.5. Twenty refurbished Northern Pacific wayside markers line the path, and bald eagles and osprey can sometimes be seen from it. The park had been finished the year before, in 1996, after years of work by Juliaetta’s citizens. It has lighted baseball and softball fields with covered dugouts, a playground and a picnic pavilion.

Sixty-six cars and an ice cream booth

The organizers called the 2024 festival the 23rd annual, and the 2026 festival, held September 12, the 25th. A June 2009 community newsletter named Kerry Cope and Ed Groseclose as the people to contact for festival information, and Groseclose took a turn in the dunk tank.

Zana Sherman owns the First Bank of Pizza in town. It occupies a former bank building listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998, and she keeps the milk in the old vault. She also runs an ice cream booth at the festival. In the IDAHO magazine piece, written after she had put the restaurant up for sale in August 2014 and then decided to keep running it herself, she described the September show while scooping hard ice cream for a pair of huckleberry cones. “I think last year we had sixty-six classic cars,” she said. “I have an ice cream booth down there. We have vendors, crafts, all kinds of stuff. We get some really good bands.”