Harrison Oktoberfest

Bratwurst in the pavilion, Jam Shack at the gazebo

On Saturday, October 3, 2026, the Harrison Elementary School Parent Teacher Association worked the pavilion in Harrison City Park from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. The PTA served bratwurst, hot dogs, German potato salad, beer cheese soup and cotton candy. That was the 19th annual Harrison Oktoberfest, as the St. Maries Gazette Record counted it. The Harrison Chamber of Commerce hosts the festival. Its notice called the place “the best little town on the lake” and reminded everyone to come “rain or shine.”

Cider and beer came from St. Joe Cider Co., Two Saints Brewery, Trail’s End Brewery and Grand Teton Brewing Co. Visit North Idaho’s listing for the festival also names home brewers among the pourers. Music came from the park gazebo all afternoon: Justyn Priest from 1 to 1:45, P.J. Destiny from 2 to 2:45, and Jam Shack from 3 until 7. Craft tables carried metal artwork, jewelry, paintings, clothing, sourdough bread, baked goods and canned goods. Townspeople had set scarecrows out across town for a competition, and ballots were handed out at the library.

The children’s program spread through the park. Sunrise the Clown twisted balloon animals from 1 to 4. A Root Beer Garden stood in the library yard from 1 to 3, and a scavenger hunt ran over the same hours. There were bounce houses, cornhole, art stations and a penny scramble, along with a 50/50 raffle. At 2:30 the children’s doughnut-eating contest was held by the playground monkey bars. “Jordan and I are very excited about putting the 19th annual Oktoberfest together this year,” the organizer, Amanda Hall, told the paper.

Drivers from Coeur d’Alene leave I-90 eastbound at exit 22, turn right at the top of the ramp, and follow Highway 97 south 28 miles. The chamber’s directions say, “You will find yourself in the center of town.”

The Mint stood where the playground is

The monkey bars occupy the site of The Mint, a saloon with rooms upstairs that the chamber calls one of the best known in town. The Mint and the other buildings on that block burned in 1917. Eleven businesses in what is now the park were never rebuilt.

The chamber dates the fire to July 21, 1917. It started at the Grant Lumber Co., and sparks blew uphill onto cloth awnings, wooden sidewalks and dry timber-frame buildings. Thousands of rounds of ammunition went off in the hardware stores while firefighters worked. Townspeople tore up the wooden sidewalks to slow the flames. The water in the hoses slowed to a drizzle, and then the hoses themselves burned. The Spokane Daily Chronicle called the town a “burning and seething hell” and reported: “A pall of grim gray smoke hangs over the town day and night. No human power can stop the blaze, say the timbermen.”

The chamber’s count is 40 businesses, 4 churches, 2 meeting halls and 23 homes lost in ninety minutes. The water works, the utility company and the city clerk’s office burned, and the town’s records with them. Apples in an orchard were baked almost perfectly on the trees. At one house the hot water tank exploded and threw its piping against a small tree so fast that the pipe wrapped twice around the trunk. Kootenai County gives a different account. Its page says the fire broke out early on Saturday morning, July 24, 1917, burned for two days in high winds, and destroyed about 30 residences, the sawmills and the business district.

Governor Alexander came to inspect the ruins. He concluded that a locomotive spark had caused the fire, although no engine had come down the track within an hour before it began. He then put Harrison under martial law and left town quickly. The summer of 1917 was the height of union unrest in the woods. That summer the Industrial Workers of the World led a strike that paralyzed the Pacific Northwest, and by mid-August half the region’s timber workers were off the job. Upriver in St. Maries, Wobblies were clashing with anti-union vigilantes. According to the chamber, Harrison’s townspeople firmly believed the fire was arson, set by Wobblies or by a disgruntled employee.

The morning after the fire, merchants found temporary quarters, and some worked out of tents. Others gave up and left. The rebuilding was done in brick and hollow tile. Within a year, five brick buildings housed six businesses, a movie theater, a post office and a lodge hall. The Masonic Temple, now the Grant Building, was finished the year after that. The rebuilt commercial core was considerably smaller than the old one.

A town on a one-mile strip

The chamber records an older name for this shore: Alkwari’t, a tribal village at the mouth of the Coeur d’Alene River, named for the way the sun sparkles on the water. The chamber’s Frontier Town page tells of a prophecy. In 1740 the Coeur d’Alene chief Circling Raven foretold the coming of men in black robes with powerful medicine, and a century later the first Jesuit Mission of the Sacred Heart was built 12 miles south of Harrison. Capt. John Mullan and his men passed the same spot in 1859 while building the Mullan Military Road between the Missouri and the Columbia.

Gold was found in the Coeur d’Alene mountains in 1882, and the stampede began in earnest in the winter of 1884. Prospectors rode steamers to the south end of the lake and turned up the river at Harrison. Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine were among them. The Coeur d’Alene chiefs ceded the northern part of their reservation in 1890. The Kootenai County page says the Crane family first settled here in 1890. It also says the town stands on a one-mile strip carved out of the reservation by a bill that President Harrison signed on the night of March 4, 1891. The Crane Historical Society dates the town’s founding to 1891 and says it was named for President Benjamin Harrison. The settlers later found they had built on land that was still reservation, and the final homestead patents in the town site were not completed until 1909.

The Village of Harrison was incorporated on July 21, 1899. The O. R. & N. Railway had arrived in 1890, and in the early 1900s trains ran through town twice a day in each direction, carrying about 1,000 passengers daily. Tugboats pulled logs downriver to waterfront lumber mills, shingle mills and factories. The 1911 city directory counted 1,250 residents, four churches, two hotels, a weekly newspaper, a high school and a grade school. The chamber says the town reached about 2,000 people at its height. The historical society says the population moved between 1,000 and 2,000, depending on how many mills were running.

The Crane house and the two-by-four jail

Silas Crane built Harrison’s first house in 1891. It stayed in the Crane family until 1936. Howard and Geraldine Russell later donated it, and it is now the Crane House Museum, run by volunteers of the Crane Historical Society. The society says twelve citizens formed it on May 5, 1984; the Idaho Heritage Trust quotes the society giving April 25, 1984. N.B. Wiley, the second governor of Idaho, planted a Russian elm in the front yard in 1891, and the society says it “still thrives today.”

Beside the house is a small red building, 12 by 16 feet: the town jail. Constable Claude Knaggs built it in 1925, with two cells, entirely of laminated two-by-fours. The society says it is one of the few such jails left in the United States. The jail saw little use. In the society’s words, “everyone in Harrison was apparently law-abiding,” so the building was sold, and John Procopio used it as a storage shed on his ranch. Later owners William and Shirley Bunton gave it back, and it was moved into town again.