Harrington Fall Festival

The day opens on the fourth Saturday of September with the “Huff N Puff” Fun Run through town and an FFA pancake breakfast at Memorial Hall. Harrington is a town of around 425 people in the wheat country of Lincoln County, Washington. The Fall Festival is its harvest celebration and the weekend when its high school alumni come home. The Harrington Chamber of Commerce lists it among the town’s yearly events, between the Vintage Country Fair in July and Hometown Christmas in December.

Third Street to the city park

After breakfast the parade comes along Third Street. The crowd then moves to Harrington City Park, which sits next to the school at Highway 23 and South 1st Street and has picnic tables, public restrooms and a covered gazebo. The afternoon at the park brings vendor booths, kids’ games, face painting and the Lions Club lunch. Across town the Harrington Opera House holds a rummage sale, and the Harrington Homemakers sell homemade pies. There is live music. Bingo and raffle drawings close the program, and the chamber’s listing carries the day on into the evening.

In 2026 the Ritzville Festivals Association put the Harrington Fall Festival Parade on September 26th. It was the last stop of a September run of wheat-country parades that also took in the Connell Fall Festival on the 12th and the Odessa Deutschesfest on the 19th. In the week before the 2026 festival, the chamber posted “Live music Friday and Saturday nights!!” On the eve it posted “Come on out on Saturday for a great day of family fun!”

A father, a son and the lunch rounds

The Odessa Record wrote in 2023 that the Lions Club BBQ lunch would begin serving at noon at the 76th annual festival on Saturday, September 23. The paper also reported that the same family has overseen smoking the rounds used for that lunch since Fall Festival began. Wes Bly took over the project in 1946, one year after the Lions Club was chartered. His son Dennis runs it now. The chamber’s own listing describes the park meal as pulled pork.

“They knew my dad had taken animal science and meats down at Wazzu,” Dennis Bly told the paper. “I came back to the farm in 1975 and by the mid-90s he finally said, ‘you’re in charge.’”

Honored classes and a cancelled year

The festival has not run every year. In the summer of 2020 the Harrington Alumni Association newsletter reported that the Lions Club had cancelled that year’s Fall Festival because of COVID 19. The association’s executive board had already called off its alumni banquet. Kathi Matthews, class of 1981 and the association’s president that year, wrote that the banquet is “a special tradition,” and she added: “we hope that this year’s honored classes will join us in 2021 for a super sized alumni banquet and Fall Festival!” The same newsletter said the Lions looked forward to celebrating the 75th Fall Festival on September 25, 2021.

That newsletter printed the class photographs of the years ending in zero, from 1950 through 2010. The Class of 1970 included Crayton Oestreich, who grew up on the family wheat farm between Harrington and Sprague. He married Beth, a 1981 graduate of Reardan High School, in 1992. The Odessa Record reported in 2023 that the couple had spent their married life joining local organizations and volunteering their skills. That year the Lions Club named Crayton, 71, and Beth, 60, Citizens of the Year, to be recognized in the Fall Festival Parade on Saturday, September 23.