Flag Day

The day starts with pancakes. The Fireman’s Pancake Breakfast opens Flag Day in Fairfield, a grain town of about 600 people in southeast Spokane County, some 30 miles southeast of Spokane on the Palouse Scenic Byway. A Fun Run follows; in 2024 the Flag Flyin’ Fun Run left the Post Office at 7:50 in the morning. At 10:30 the children’s parade gathers at the corner of Main Street and South McNeil, one block east of the Fairfield Community Center. It is free and needs no entry form. The Fairfield Service Club, which runs the day, asks parents to “load up your kids and their bikes/trikes” and bring them to the decoration center first. The Grand Parade follows down Main Street at 11.

The 116th celebration fell on June 13, 2026, the second Saturday of June, as the date now runs. It honored the Liberty High School Class of 1976. KHQ’s preview listed a fireman’s breakfast, the kids’ parade, live bands, vendors, and a wrestling show. The night before, the Service Club held a Kids Game Night upstairs at the Community Center.

Two parks and a dance

After the parade the town moves to its parks. Vendors bring hand-made crafts, and food and coffee vendors set up beside a beer garden. Through the day there is a softball game and a session in hands-only CPR. The club tells families to bring chairs and blankets. The lower park has a playground and a skate park. The upper park has basketball and tennis courts and grills, for those who pack in their own food. The town museum is open, and the Service Club points visitors to its Military Wall of Honor: “there may be someone you know up there.”

At the 2025 celebration, by HistoryLink’s account, professional wrestling at Thiel Park filled the afternoon, and the day closed with a dance party in the park featuring The Rusty Jackson Band. The club has since made the evening dance at the lower park a fixed close to the day.

The afternoon has changed over the decades. In 1997 cloggers and tap dancers performed in the park gazebo, the service club set up small carnival rides, and the El Katif Shrine Chanters and Jazz Band gave a program of patriotic music in the Grange Hall. The Rock Creek Quilters hung an exhibit in the Presbyterian Church that year, and the adults’ dance was held at the fire station. A former resident, writing in 2015, remembered a demolition derby, draft horse teams, hot rods, clowns, and the carnival setting up on the old school yard.

Down Main Street

The parade is the center of the day. In 1997 it carried old cars, tractors, llamas, a drill team, war veterans, and a color guard from Fairchild Air Force Base. Gerry McLean of the Fairfield Fire Department, president of the parade committee, said that year: “The citizens are fiercely loyal to the celebration. It’s been a tradition for so long, we don’t want to let it go.”

The 2004 parade came a week after Ronald Reagan’s death. Flags elsewhere stood at half-staff, and in Fairfield they flew from porches and storefronts, from the backs of pickup trucks, and from the tops of children’s bicycle helmets. Silos and John Deere tractors stood behind the crowd. The procession opened with a gaggle of children riding bicycles down the hill. The theme was “Wild, Wild West,” and many children wore cowboy hats and boots and decorated their bikes, trikes, and wheelbarrows in stars and stripes. Residents of the Fairfield Good Samaritan Nursing Home watched from their wheelchairs in star-spangled hats, waving flags. Jack O’Dowd, a Korean War veteran wounded several times, presented the colors with his guide dog, Jill.

The citizen of the year in 2004 was Bud Loeffler, 90, born in Fairfield and a mechanic until he retired. He recalled driving a brand-new black Ford coupe in the 1933 parade. Seventy-one years later he rode in a convertible and waved to the crowd. “It’s a nice, quiet little town,” he said. “Nobody gets in trouble much.”

The town does the work itself. In 1997 about 40 people, mostly from the fire department and the Service Club, began planning around the first of the year. In the first two weeks of June, residents swept sidewalks, climbed telephone poles to hang flags, and carried chairs into the Grange Hall. Don Thies, then president of the Service Club and a lifetime resident, said: “This has been going on since my grandfather was a kid and I think it’s a real worthwhile thing.” In 2004 Bill Enzler, the club’s treasurer, put it shortly: “We love our flag.” Class reunions are planned around the date, and college students and people who have moved away come home for it.

A demonstration train in 1910

Fairfield was settled in 1888, after the railroad came through. It was known first as Truax and then as Regis, and it took the name Fairfield when its post office opened in 1889. Voters approved incorporation 56 to 22, and the papers were filed on March 3, 1905.

According to HistoryLink, the first celebration, on June 14, 1910, was not called Flag Day. It was Demonstration Train Day. The Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company, by then owned by Union Pacific, sent trains to remote farm towns to teach newer methods. The 1910 train brought several cars of exhibits and models, a lecture on conserving soil moisture and proper plowing, and a demonstration of a milking machine, still a novelty for rural dairy farmers. There were games and a luncheon, flags were part of the occasion, and the event soon became an annual Flag Day.

The flag that year had 46 stars. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed June 14 as Flag Day in 1916. The Service Club notes that President Truman did not sign the act designating June 14 as National Flag Day until August 3, 1949, 39 years after Fairfield’s first celebration.

Counting the years

The sources do not agree on how unbroken the run has been. A Washington State Senate resolution adopted March 11, 2010, called 2010 Fairfield’s 100th consecutive year, “a record believed to be unmatched by any community in the United States.” The Spokesman-Review wrote in 2004 that the town had celebrated since 1910 “except for a few years during World War II.” HistoryLink says the celebration has been held every year except one during that war. A commenter on the club’s website, Alden Cross, wrote in 2009 that he had been told it was skipped in 1918 because of the flu, and that he could date the first celebration only to 1909 or 1910.

The claims of rank differ as well. In 1997 the local historian Glen Adams called it the oldest community Flag Day festival in the West. HistoryLink calls it nationally recognized as the oldest continuously running such event in the country. The town’s own website calls Fairfield the first city in the United States to celebrate Flag Day for 100 years. The welcome sign the town uses is simpler: “The town that celebrates Flag Day.”

The centennial ran from June 11 to 13, 2010. Its program included the parade, high school reunions, and a new flagpole at the Southeast Spokane County Museum, the building that served as Fairfield City Hall in 1910. The pole was dedicated to the men and women of Fairfield and southeast Spokane County who served in the country’s defense. The Southeast Spokane County Historical Society presented a flag for it, which was to have flown over the United States Capitol on March 3, 105 years to the day after Fairfield incorporated.