Clearwater County Fair

Four days in the city park

The logging arena in Orofino City Park is the center of the weekend. On Sunday, September 20, 2026, the free OCI log show ran there from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It was the 77th Orofino Lumberjack Days, held together with what the Clearwater Tribune numbered the 78th Clearwater County Fair. The theme was “Rooted in Freedom, Built on Grit.” The Orofino Celebrations Inc. grand marshals were Neal and Jeannie Johnson, and the princesses were Bethany Bushey and Hadlei Pederson.

The princesses spent the summer on the road ahead of the fair. They visited Jeff Jones at KLER, rode in the Grangeville Border Days parade on July 3 and in Orofino’s Fourth of July parade, and appeared at the Weippe Rodeo parade, Kamiah BBQ Days, and the Lewiston Roundup Parade. They also handed out the 2026 posters and held a royalty car wash.

The 2026 weekend opened at 4 p.m. on Thursday, September 17, when the Midway of Fun Carnival started running. Presale carnival tickets cost $30, the same as the year before. After the presale closed at 1 p.m. on the Wednesday, they cost $5 more. On Friday evening at 6 the 4-H Livestock Auction was held in the logging arena. The fair exhibits stood in the exhibit building at the park entrance.

Saturday began early. The Orofino volunteer firemen served breakfast at the firehouse, 217 1st Street, from 6 to 9 a.m. The Big OCI Parade stepped off on Michigan Avenue at 10. The OCI Auction filled the logging arena from 12:30 p.m., and the horse pulling contest took the same ground at 6:30 that evening. On Sunday the firemen served breakfast again from 7 to 10 a.m. before the log show. In 2012 the firemen’s breakfast was held at the Community Center, downstairs from the Pizza Factory. It was all you can eat for $8: scrambled eggs, sausage, and pancakes, with Don Gardner, John Cook, and Steve Laws at the griddle.

Two organizations, one weekend

The two events share the grounds and the calendar, but they are run by different organizations. The pandemic made that plain. In 2021 Lumberjack Days was canceled over concerns about COVID-19, and the county fair opened anyway. William Warren, the University of Idaho extension agent for Clearwater County, explained the division to the Lewiston Tribune:

“The Orofino Lumberjack Days celebration is a private entity and they’re responsible for the lumberjack competition on Sunday, the lumberjack auction on Saturday, the horse pull on Saturday night, the parade during Saturday and the food booths and vendors in the city park and the carnival,” Warren said. “That’s technically not part of the fair and all of that is canceled.”

What remained that September was the fair alone. It had open class and 4-H home economics exhibits in the exhibit hall and 4-H livestock contests in the livestock arena. All livestock events were moved outdoors that year. The day before opening, Clearwater County Sheriff Chris Goetz, president of the 4-H Leaders Council, was out putting up fencing for the outdoor auction. Organizers expected 12 beef projects, 63 swine projects, and two sheep projects. “Those numbers may seem small,” Warren said. “But we don’t have the number of animals that other counties do.” The auction of 2020, he added, had raised over $100,000 for the county’s 4-H members.

A letter in 1947

The fair is the older of the two. The Clearwater Tribune gave its founding year as 1912, and the Idaho State Archives holds a photograph titled “Clearwater County Fair – Orofino, Idaho, 1914.”

According to OCI’s own history, the organization was first thought of in 1946. In 1947, Vernon Butler and Jake Arfsten are credited with sending a letter to the organizations of Orofino. It announced that an organization was being formed to help make a bigger and better county fair. Nancy C. Butler, writing in 2012 for Window on the Clearwater, described the start as a cooperative effort of local churches and organizations. Mel Snook recalled about 25 people at the first meetings. They drew up by-laws and elected officers: J.B. “Buzz” Oud as president, Snook as vice president, Butler as treasurer, and Wayne Shriver as secretary. Businessmen, firms, and logging men put up the money.

The first year brought a three-day celebration. It included a big parade, a kids’ parade, a model airplane contest, a fiddlers’ contest, and a knot hole derby, a race for boys driving cars they had built themselves from wood and scraps. It also included a lumberjack show. Snook owned a logging business, and he laid out the contests in chopping, bucking, and the use of the peavey, the axe, and muscle. The skills chosen were those of the logger that were dying out due to mechanization.

The first Lumberjack Day was held on September 28, 1947, and it was a hot day. About 4,000 people watched the chopping, the bucking, the two-man sawing, and a team-pulling contest. The organizers had little experience with crowds. Snook said the people kept edging closer, and by the last sawing contest they stood thick around the contestants. The next year there was better crowd control. Fair Board Chairman W.C. Peace and County Agent Bruce Brooks publicly thanked Orofino Celebrations for “making the fair.”

Harriet (Walrath) Reece was a princess that first year. She recalled no contest, gowns, or crowns. The girls wore jeans and logger shirts, and each had been nominated by an organization in the county. At their ball in August a hat went around, and the girl who drew the slip marked “queen” was queen. That year it was Carolyn (Tull) Cuddy. Before the fair the girls traveled by caravan through neighboring towns, advertising and selling raffle tickets. During the fair a helicopter in the park gave rides, and Reece said the royalty “twisted” Buzz Oud’s arm to buy them tickets.

Shriver remembered concession booths as part of the celebration from the beginning. The women of the Grange did especially well selling pies at one of them, and he said they wound up one of the richest granges in the state.

Floodwater, quonset huts, and the Roby family

In May 1948 a flood wiped out the fair buildings and the pavilion. With local ingenuity, and with war surplus quonset huts obtained through national flood relief, the fair and Lumberjack Days went ahead under the cry “Bigger and Better in ‘48.”

The early contestants were mostly local people with experience in the timber industry. One story from those years concerns a contest called “tail down.” Two poles were set on an incline, and the contestant used a cant hook to roll three logs down them. Each log was 16 feet 4 inches long, and it had to stay between two pegs with three inches to spare on each side. One year an expert logger was fetched from a local bar for his turn. He was inebriated, and he won. The contest was later discontinued as too dangerous.

Gerri (Roby) Lemmon remembered her father, Clarence Roby, then a police officer, walking into the arena, taking off his hat and gun, and crosscut sawing with his brother Ralph. They took first place. When Gerri and her double cousin Dorothy Roby were 14 or 15, their fathers turned them loose on the saw to see what they could do. At first, she said, there were a lot of “Roby expletives.” Then the fathers started laughing, and the girls knew they had “pleased those big lumberjack daddies.” The cousins later won first place in crosscut sawing for 15- to 17-year-olds, and her uncle Delbert Roby was All Around Jack for several years.

The Altmillers, relatives of the Robys, competed too. Jake Altmiller started in 1949. In an interview before his death, he said he had “never counted” his wins but felt he had taken his share. In his later years he entered only the stock saw event, in which contestants bring their own chains. He said it took about a week or better to file a chain to the right shape for speed.

A high pole and a birling pond

Jim Bessent announced the log show for a number of years. One of his favorite parts of the day was Danny Sailor’s high pole act. Far up the pole, Sailor did knee bends and “the bicycle.” To finish, he threw his pointed hat and tried to beat it to the ground in a free fall, wearing the needed safety gear.

Bessent teased the contestants, and once they dared him to climb the pole. He put on the gear and got about a third of the way up the 100 feet before he found he could not come down with the spikes in his boots. He tried a free fall like Sailor’s and reached the bottom. Afterward, he said, there were thousands of slivers to take out of his belly. Another year the teasing ended with Bessent carried in his chair, cigar and all, and thrown into the birling pond. Ted Peterson took the microphone after Bessent retired.

Others served the show for decades. Monk Montgomery timed events from the beginning. Ingrid Ponozzo was OCI’s secretary and manager for 20 years, and Dave Pollock helped in the 4-H livestock barns. The 2024 edition marked the 75th anniversary of Lumberjack Days under the theme “A Timeless Tradition.” It came two years later than the count from 1947 would suggest, because the show had been canceled for two years over COVID.