Founders Day

Friday at Waterfront Park

The 2026 Founders Day opened on Friday, June 19, at Waterfront Park. From 6 to 10 p.m. there were live bands, food trucks, and a cornhole tournament played in doubles, two against two, to 21 points, with brackets for players 11 and under, 12 to 17, and 18 and up. At 10 o’clock the fireworks went up. The organizers told people to watch from Waterfront Park or from Coney Island Park.

Golf filled the morning. Mayor Cooper played a nine-hole, four-person scramble from 8 a.m. to noon. The main festival page puts the scramble at Fairways Golf Course, and the tournament’s own page puts it at The Plains on West Melville Road.

Saturday on Lake and Lefevre

Saturday, June 20, began early at the schools. Wrestlers weighed in at Medical Lake High School at 8 a.m., and children from 5 to 18 wrestled at 10. A co-ed outdoor volleyball tournament for the high school team started at 9 on the middle school field. The City Parks & Rec Department ran a co-ed softball tournament. The food trucks in the food court opened at 9.

The parade stepped off at 10. Its announcer worked from the main stage at the corner of Lake and Lefevre streets, and live performances followed there through the day, with a DJ in the afternoon. In 2017 several businesses, clubs, and groups rode or marched, and the grand marshal was Col. Ryan Samuelson, commander of the 92nd Air Refueling Wing at Fairchild Air Force Base.

More than 50 vendor booths sold food and crafts in the STCU parking lot at 120 South Broad Street. The main festival page gives the market’s hours as 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the market page says 10 to 3. A block down, at 210 South Broad, Sunwest Automotive held a car show from 11 to 3. Bounce houses, a petting zoo, magicians, and stilt walkers were set up around town.

A triathlon from a television set

At 1 p.m. the Trailblazer Tri/Du/5K starts from Waterfront Park. The triathlon is a 350-meter point-to-point open-water swim, a 12.2-mile bike ride, and a 2.92-mile run. The duathlon replaces the swim with a one-mile run. The 5K is a single loop of the Medical Lake Trail. Awards are handed out at 2:30, and the course closes at 3. In the 2025 5K, Logan Bradley won the men’s race in 17:14. Gage Bradley was second, and a third Bradley, Alexy, came fourth. Alison Mandi won the women’s race in 18:48.

Dave Perry started the race in the early 1980s to raise money for adult athletic teams. In 2008, the race’s twenty-fifth year, he was still running it, and he told The Spokesman-Review how it began: “We weren’t sure what to do. One year we did a bed race. But that was more just for fun. Then we started thinking about what we can do. We have the water here, so we thought, ‘What about a bathtub race, or make your own boat out of milk cartons?’ Then sitting around watching TV one night, the Hawaiian Iron Man came on, and it just struck me, ‘There it is.’ We have the water, we have the path.”

In 2008 the course started at Coney Island Park. Swimmers crossed the width of Medical Lake, about 1,200 feet, in water usually in the 60s. They rode about 12 miles around Clear Lake and ran 3.4 miles around Medical Lake. Entry fees supported the adult softball and basketball teams Perry managed. He had first played on one of them, the Generals, a modified fast-pitch softball team. “We put our emphasis on participation,” he said. “Everyone gets a medal for finishing.” He remembered athletes who came “up the beach through geese droppings” and never complained: “I never had a coarse word.”

The committee and its trolley

The Spokesman-Review wrote in 2008 that Founders Day was a commemoration begun 37 years earlier to honor the people who settled the town. A volunteer committee planned it each year starting in January, and thousands of people came. That year’s program had a parade, softball, basketball, a car show, and a tour on an antique trolley. “We take you around with a 30-minute spiel,” said Leslie Smith, the committee chairwoman. “A lady gets up and tells you of all the (historic) highlight sights, when we were swinging.” Vendors gave most of their takings to local causes. “Friends for Children has a booth, and they donate their money back to Founder’s Day, or they give it to our food bank,” Smith said. “It’s all kind of a continual cycle of giving.”

In 2017 the Friday street dance came back with four area bands. The Pick N Roll basketball tournament, the car show, and the triathlon were all held again that Saturday.

The festival is now run by Re*Imagine Medical Lake, an all-volunteer nonprofit. Its Festivals & Events Committee, chaired by Reggie Heebink, also puts on the town’s fall and winter festivals. The group describes itself as formed “to bring back the vision of our ‘founders.’” It marked its tenth year with its first fundraiser on September 26, 2026, at St. Anne’s Parish Hall, where auctioneer Randy Johnson sold off desserts from local bakers.

Sheep, salt, and a castle tower

The founders the festival honors arrived on June 15, 1872. Andrew Lefevre was a French-Canadian who had come west in the Gold Rush and later hauled freight for the army. According to his son, he found the lake years earlier while searching for ponies that had strayed from Willow Springs, and he called it “lac de medicine.” In 1872 he and his nephew Peter, known as “Big Pete,” bought “500 sheep and a few horses and cattle” in Walla Walla and drove them north to the shore.

The Spokane Tribe and other nearby tribes had come to the lake for thousands of years, believing its water, mud, and salts could cure. According to one report, they called it Skookum Limechin Chuch, “strong medicine water.” They laid the sick on beds above hot stones and poured lake water over the stones to make steam. The historian N. W. Durham wrote that the tribes told Andrew Lefevre the water was poisonous to discourage him, but he homesteaded the site of the present town anyway. Peter said they proved the water’s powers by washing their sheep in it to cure scab. Andrew then bathed in it himself, and his rheumatism “was almost completely cured.”

Stanley Hallett, an Englishman who is said to have dropped the title “Lord” when he reached America, arrived in 1877. He boiled lake water down to salt and sold it as a cure, along with Medical Lake Soap. When the town voted on June 7, 1890, to incorporate, Hallett became its first mayor. After an electric interurban line from Spokane opened in 1905, thousands of visitors came on hot summer days, and on one of them bathers rented 1,400 bathing suits. There were footraces every Sunday and band concerts at a bandstand by the water. The Coney Island Resort was one of the parks around the shore. By 1922 the interurban had gone out of business, and the resort years were over.

In 1900 Hallett built a castle-like house with rounded towers and brick walls two to four feet thick. “Father always wanted a castle,” one of his daughters said. Every Fourth of July, he and a daughter climbed through a trap door to the top of the tower and set off “$50 worth of Roman candles and other fireworks” while the town watched.