Clancy Days

Clancy Days begins at the Firehall at 8 in the morning. The Clancy Gold Nuggets 4-H serves pancakes, eggs, and sausage there until 10, for an $8 donation a plate. By 9 the rest of the town is open. N. Main Street and E. Clancy St., with part of Legal Tender Lane, are closed to cars for the day, and booths, food, and music fill them until 4 in the afternoon. Clancy is a town of about 1,800 people in Jefferson County, 10 miles south of Helena and about 45 miles north of Butte, at exit 182 off Interstate 15. KTVH reported that the festival draws around 5,000 visitors. The organizers, the Clancy community, call it the region’s kickoff to the summer season. The 2026 festival fell on Saturday, June 13.

Booths, a museum lawn, and a stick horse rodeo

On the day of the 2026 festival, the Clancy Days page counted 114 vendors on the closed streets. The Clancy Parent Council sold fresh lemonade to benefit the elementary school. One maker sold candles poured into recycled soda and energy-drink cans. Helena Backcountry Llamas came to explain that llamas carry heavy loads on the trail and that even young children can lead them. A grandmother and grandson sold plants as 4-R Ranch, giving the money to a local cause of the grandson’s choosing; past ones were the Jefferson County Animal Shelter and the Montana City and Clancy volunteer fire departments. A teenager sold crocheted creations to save for a car. In 2025, The Monitor reported, residents set yard-sale tables between the retailers, with old jigsaw puzzles and antique glassware for sale.

The day spreads past Main Street. The car show parks classic and custom vehicles at Legal Tender until 3. Regional food trucks line up in the Clancy Elementary School parking lot. At the Jefferson County Museum, spinners and weavers give demonstrations, and visitors can pan for gold and try metal detecting until 2; in 2026 the museum also gave away wildflower seeds. Friends of the Library holds a used book sale until 1. The Clancy Community Center gives tours and explains its proposed renovations. In 2026 it asked visitors to share their stories of past Clancy Days and help identify old photographs. Southwest Montana’s travel listing names living history from the 2nd US Cavalry Association, talks by artisans and historical experts, bake sales, and the fire department’s firewood raffle.

The youngest children have a stick horse rodeo at the fire department field, open to those 6 and under, from 10 to 10:30. A Kids Karnival runs behind the fire department all day. At Touch-a-Truck, children climb on fire trucks, patrol cars, and rescue vehicles. Helena Competitive Elite Cheer runs a dunk tank until 2. In 2025 the man on the plank was Keith Foley, board president of the Jefferson Local Development Corporation. Children paid a dollar a throw to drop him in. One child could not hit the target, walked up, and pressed the switch by hand. “I can’t feel my feet any more!” Foley said, laughing, as he climbed back onto the platform.

Music comes from the main stage on Main Street. In 2025 singer Isaac Carroll opened it with his guitar at 9 a.m. as visitors were still hunting for parking in freshly mowed pastures. Lance Handyside of Montana City followed. He often plays Chubby’s Bar and Grill and Ting’s, which NonStop Local described as a historical local bar. In 2026 a talent show was held beside Chubby’s. That June morning in 2025 the breeze picked up, and The Monitor’s reporter saw cottonwood seeds fill the air over the crowd “like swirling snowflakes.”

The parade at half past two

In the early afternoon the car show and Touch-a-Truck begin to empty. Many of the cars and rigs leave to join the parade muster at the Clancy Soil, Granite & Sand lot. The parade steps off at 2:30, and cross traffic stops along the route for the next hour. The festival’s own advice is to bring a lawn chair.

The Monitor described the 2025 parade in order:

• An American Legion float built to resemble an old locomotive led it off.
• A band of drummers and bagpipers came next.
• The Helena Shriners zipped their clown cars back and forth across Main Street.
• Classic muscle cars came behind fire trucks from Clancy, Jefferson City, Montana City, and the DNRC, all tossing candy to the crowd.
• Then came large specialty cranes and excavation equipment, a motorcycle club in jackets lettered “Lowlifes,” and riders on horseback.

Michael McCarthy, assistant chief of the Clancy Volunteer Fire Department, told KTVH about his own part in it. “My kids get on the truck, throw candy out to the kids,” he said.

The parade was not always at that hour. In 2022 the fire department sounded its siren at 1:00 to start a parade of tractors, fire trucks, and floats around the town. After the parade comes the race and the raffle drawing. Southwest Montana’s listing calls it a duck race in Clancy Creek. The Clancy Days page in 2026 called it the “Puck Duck Race.” The Whitehall Ledger explained in 2022 that the prize-money race uses wooden disks instead of rubber ducks.

The Monitor’s reporter wrote that when the last of the 2025 parade passed, it was as if a curtain came down. Vendors boxed up what had not sold. Event coordinator Phil Downer began collecting the barricades and traffic signs that he and his family had set out the night before. When someone stopped him to say he had done a great job, Downer gave a tired smile and said, “Thanks.” Cars honked as they left town, and the cottonwood seeds gathered along the edges of the street like drifts. The next morning in 2026, volunteers met at the Old Red Schoolhouse steps from 10 to noon to clean up.

Two stories of how it started

The sources do not agree on when Clancy Days began.

| Source | Account | |---|---| | The Monitor (2025) | First conceived in the early 1960s as a fundraiser for the fire department. The early events included a weekend rodeo, barn dances, and other celebrations spread over several days. | | KRTV (2018) | Organizers said the event had been running for around 60 years, kept going by volunteers. | | KTVH | Called it a celebration of nearly 50 years. It began in the 1980s as a fundraiser for the Methodist church and the volunteer fire department. | | MarketCrafty listing | Said “over two decades.” |

KTVH added that other groups now raise their own money at the festival, from the 4-H breakfast to the firewood raffle.

The Monitor also traced how the size changed. As the mines and railroads went away, the festival shrank to a single day that was essentially a local garage sale. More recently it added commercial vendors, information booths, historical demonstrations, and a play area for children. In 2022 NonStop Local reported more than 25 vendors. “It sure has gotten a lot bigger!” was a remark The Monitor’s reporter heard throughout the 2025 festival.

Silver ore and homesteaders

Clancy was founded in 1864, according to a 2022 piece in The Whitehall Ledger, as a mining, ranching, and agricultural area. In the early 20th century, trains between Butte and Helena stopped at Clancy and nearby Alhambra to bring visitors to the local hot springs resort. KRTV quoted the VisitMT description of the town as a famous silver camp of the late nineteenth century. Its ore was rich enough to turn a profit even after it was hauled by bull team to Fort Benton and shipped by river and ocean to Swansea, Wales, for smelting.

The festival takes up that history by theme. In 2022 the theme was “Proving Up!”, about the hardships faced by homesteaders who came to Clancy. That was also the first Clancy Days for Kiaya Inks, 9, who had just moved to town with her grandmother. “So far, my favorite thing is seeing all my teachers, all my friends, and having all the cotton candy and sweets!” she told NonStop Local. Two of those teachers, Shelle Walker and Megan Russell, spent the day dressed as clowns.

KTVH reported that organizers begin preparing the previous fall and put hundreds of hours into the work. One of them, Carly Delsigne, came to Clancy Days as a child. “Kids that I met when they were tiny, when they were babies, come to Clancy Days, and I get a big hug, and I get to meet their kids,” she said.