Craigmont June Picnic

The June Picnic falls on the fourth Saturday in June in Craigmont, a Camas Prairie wheat town in Lewis County, Idaho, on U.S. 95 about 45 miles south and east of Lewiston. The Lewis County genealogy site puts its population at 600. The picnic fills a whole weekend. The 2025 edition ran from 7 a.m. Friday, June 27, to 7 p.m. Sunday, June 29, under the theme “The Little Town That Could,” with tournaments and games, live music, food, and a parade. The same county site lists a parade and a barbecue and says the picnic commemorates the town’s creation.

Cornhole in the fire hall

The 2026 picnic ran in poor weather. Afterward the organizers wrote that “the weather made a HUGE impact on the weekend” and thanked “everyone who stuck it out.” On Friday, June 26, the parent-and-child cornhole tournament, set for 3 p.m., moved indoors to the Craigmont Fire Station. That is the four-bay station the volunteer fire department built across the street from the site of two grain warehouses that burned on May 12, 2013. The garage holds up to eight vehicles.

The rest of the weekend went on around town. There was a kiddie parade and sidewalk chalk art, and the town honored its veterans. Shirley Sears escorted the grand marshals, as the organizers say she always does. In volleyball, C Squad took first, Dig Dynasty second, and Dripping Wet third. Phillip and Max Way won the egg toss, with Michael and Erik second. CJ Air made the ping pong ball drop, which the organizers called “a huge success as always,” and a few people came away holding the gold balls.

A glow run was added in 2026. “For a newby event, the turnout was amazing!” the organizers posted that evening. The local Herald carried the updated schedule as a flyer in picnic week.

The picnic also gives a scholarship. The 2026 winner was Aaron Kinzer, who, by the organizers’ account, had “spent countless hours making our community look nice for June Picnic.” He planned to study crop science and management at the University of Idaho.

Each year the picnic sells a commemorative shirt. “Our June Picnic shirt sales and sponsors are what keep the yearly celebration continuing year after year,” the organizers wrote in June 2026. The shirts sold for $17, or $20 in the largest sizes. After the weekend the last few were marked down to $10, and by July 4 they were gone. Old classes come home for the picnic too: the first Highland graduating class, of 1963, held its fiftieth reunion at the June Picnic in 2013.

Chicago, Ilo, and a mile of prairie

The picnic is older than the town’s name. The Nez Perce Indian Reservation opened for settlement on November 18, 1895, and settlers came onto the Camas Prairie to stake homesteads. By 1898 a townsite called Chicago had 60 lots. Its first building was a general store, which changed hands several times in its first year. O.W. Leggett eventually bought it and made it the town’s first permanent business.

The post office kept confusing Chicago, Idaho, with Chicago, Illinois. Mail for one went to the other, and farmers waited on replacement parts for their machinery. In 1902 or 1903 Leggett, a notary, had the town renamed for his older daughter, Ilo. A fire destroyed most of Ilo in 1904, and residents soon rebuilt it.

Between 1907 and 1909 the Camas Prairie Railroad extended its tracks south from Lewiston, and they passed about a mile from Ilo. The townspeople moved their town to the tracks. The University of Idaho’s archive notes place the new site on the south side of the tracks. Shelley Kuther, writing in Idaho Magazine, puts it on the west side, where the Craigmont business district now stands. The Lewiston Evening Teller of September 23, 1907, reported: “Last week witnessed great activity in the removal of the old business houses to the new town. Buildings were hauled across the prairie by steam, horses, and capstan.”

The steam engines and capstan probably belonged to Sterling Norman Bunce. His grandson, Adelbert “Del” Buttrey, described him in a 1979 book, The Buttrey Davis Story: “To begin with, he was huge, usually weighing between 350 and 400 pounds, most of the time closer to 400.” He added: “His huge, powerful engines and his rolling equipment enabled him to take on large moving operations, and occasionally his steam engine could be seen along the roads of the prairie moving some building from here to there.”

Miss Ilo and Mr. Vollmer

While Ilo was moving, John P. Vollmer, a Lewiston merchant and financier, laid out a townsite named for himself on the other side of the tracks. Each town had its own church, bank, newspaper, school, post office, and business and residential districts. The archive notes describe them as “existing side by side in complete disharmony, each town trying to out do the other.” When Lewis County was formed from Nez Perce County in 1911, Kuther writes, that discord was the main reason the county seat went to Nezperce, though Nezperce was smaller than Ilo and Vollmer.

Hard times after the First World War brought the two towns together. The 1963 volume The Highlands of Craig Mountain says, “Citizens were getting out of sorts by the constant bickering and rivalry.” At a joint meeting the two towns agreed to unite. According to the archive notes, they consolidated on June 17, 1920.

The next day, June 18, the annual picnic was held. There a mock wedding was performed. Buel Bartlett played “Miss Ilo.” Sterling N. Bunce, whose engines had hauled Ilo across the prairie, played “Mr. Vollmer.” The couple was pronounced Craigmont. The archive and Idaho Magazine say the name honors Colonel William Craig, Idaho’s first permanent white settler. The county genealogy site says it comes from Craig Mountain, which is named for him.

Nine days after the wedding, Jo Thomason was born in Craigmont. She later taught in the town’s schools for forty years and is Shelley Kuther’s mother. “As far as we know,” Kuther writes, “she was the first person born in Craigmont.”