Havre Festival Days

At ten o’clock on the Saturday of Havre Festival Days, the parade leaves Rod’s Drive In on the south end of town. It travels north on Fifth Avenue, turns west on Third Street, and ends between the Atrium and the post office. The 2026 edition, the 46th, ran September 18 to 20 under the theme “Stars, Stripes & Hi-Line Life,” and its parade carried about seventy entrants. Hi-Line Today called the parade the weekend’s biggest event. The floats come from civic organizations and businesses, and in some years from political candidates. A 2015 photograph in the Havre Daily News shows parade-goers along the curb waiting for candy to be handed down to them. In 2026 the Mayor’s Choice award went to Bullhook Community Health Center, Best Non-Commercial to St. Jude Thaddeus School, and Best Commercial to Northern Montana Hospital.

The Havre Area Chamber of Commerce, in its office at 130 Fifth Avenue, runs the parade and the vendor show. Tessa Nystrom, the chamber’s office manager, said in 2026 that planning took up the two months before the festival, though “really the beginning of the year people were reaching out about Festival Days.” In 2016 the chamber’s executive director, Debbie Vandeberg, described the chamber’s job as organizing the parade and the Commercial and Crafts show and otherwise acting as facilitator. The rest of the weekend comes from a long list of clubs, businesses and volunteers. “Like the saying goes, it takes a community, and it really does,” she said.

Buttons, mugs and Beast Treats

Festival Days starts in the shops before it reaches the street. Early in September the chamber puts out buttons at $2, cups at $5 and mugs at $10. In 2026 they sold at the chamber office and around town at Norman’s Ranchwear, McLean’s Grocery, BenFranklin Crafts, Big Sky Soul, Cavaliers Clothing, Stokes and E-1 Towing & Auto Repair. Each button carries a number. The week before the festival, the chamber drew five numbers a day and posted them on Facebook each afternoon, then drew three grand prizes from all the numbers. Winners bring their buttons to the chamber office to claim prizes donated by local businesses. In 2026 those included two round-trip flight vouchers from Cape Air and a wood pellet grill from Les Schwab Tire Centers. The buttons were nearly sold out by the Monday of festival week. Days after the festival the chamber was still listing unclaimed numbers and warning that it would redraw them. In 2023 some businesses also gave a discount to anyone who walked in wearing a button.

The mugs work at the bar. Over the festival weekend, holders get drink specials at places such as the Gallery Lounge, Vic’s Place and the Duck Inn. In 2023 Shelli Sayers, then the chamber’s office manager, said only a limited number of glass mugs were made that year “since we’re transitioning to more of a stadium cups.”

The Beast Treat Competition ran through Sunday, September 20, 2026. Nine businesses took part, among them 40 Below Public House, Grace & Grit Coffee Company, Gram’s Ice Cream and Candy Shoppe, Shamrocks Bar & Casino and Tail-Gators. Each offered a treat, and the public tasted and voted. The chamber called it “an incredibly close competition from start to finish.” Murphy’s Pub won.

Pancakes at seven, a street dance at eight

The weekend program changes in its details from year to year, but newspaper and radio accounts from 2016 and 2023 show the regular pieces. Saturday begins at seven in the morning with the Kiwanis Pancake Feed at the Havre Eagles Club. The breakfast started in the 1950s, before Festival Days existed; in 2016 the Havre Daily News called it “a 60-some-year tradition.” The Friends of the Library Book Sale fills the days before and during the festival with donated and retired books. In 2016 a photographer found volunteer Pat Feeney sorting stock at the Havre-Hill County Library the day before the sale opened. The Hi-Line Quilt Guild hangs its Festival of Quilts, held in the former VFW Club in 2016 and at the Holiday Village Mall in 2023. The Holiday Village also houses the craft and vendor show.

The Steve Heil Memorial Car Show has run since 2014 in memory of a local car enthusiast. In 2016 it filled the Independence Bank parking lot on Fourth Avenue, and in 2023 it was on Third Street. The 48-Hour Softball Tournament opens Friday at six in the evening at the Sixth Avenue Memorial Field and runs through Sunday, with teams from around the region and from Canada. In the basement of the Frank DeRosa Railroad Museum, model trains run through a scene of the local area in historic times, with a short history of the railroad. In 2016 the display told the story of the Great Northern’s Empire Builder, now an Amtrak train.

The Saturday Market on Town Square holds its last day of the season during Festival Days. The market began about twenty years before 2023, after the chamber finished work on the square. Vandeberg said it is usually the biggest market of the year, since people come to shop after the parade. In the evenings the Eagles Club holds a street dance on Friday and Saturday at eight, and in 2023 PJ’s Restaurant and Casino held another on the 300 block of Main Street. The Havre Jaycees put on a Glow Run, and the Havre Trap Club holds a Moonlight Shoot. On Sunday a one-mile family fun run is named for the Bear Paw Beast.

Other events have come and gone. In 2016 the program included a documentary film festival in the Little Theatre at Montana State University-Northern, the E-1 Demolition Derby at the Great Northern Fairgrounds, and a customer-appreciation burnout at Custom Collision Repair, with drivers “seeing whose car can make the most smoke spinning its tires.” The Havre Lions Club sponsored bagpipes for the 2018 festival. In the 2019–2020 club year it reported $3,600 in Festival Days sales from its Pronto Pup booth.

Three accounts of 1980

Sources agree that the first Festival Days came around 1980 and disagree about why. The Central Montana tourism office says a group of community members started it in 1980, after the town had gone more than a decade without an annual celebration, and that it has since become a traditional send-off to summer. In 2023 the Havre Daily News described it as a revival, begun in the 1980s, of a community music festival held in the area from the 1930s until the 1960s. That same year Shelli Sayers gave the chamber office’s version: “Well, it started in 1980, from what I understand, as an after harvest celebration and as a means for our community and the surrounding areas to come together to celebrate the completion of harvest.”

The parade carries its own count. Sayers called the 2023 parade the 43rd annual, and Hi-Line Today called the 2026 celebration the 46th. Bob and Kathy Doney, owners of Bob’s Greenhouse, were the 2023 grand marshals. That year’s theme marked 130 years of community.

From Bullhook Bottoms

The themes often look back at the town. In 2018 Jody Olson, then the chamber’s director, announced “Roots and Branches ... We Need Each Other.” Office manager Julea Robbins designed the logo, and the chamber planned to fold the 125th anniversary of Havre’s incorporation into its advertising. “I still believe in the saying ‘Havre, It’s the People,’” Olson said.

That anniversary reaches back to September 5, 1893, when Havre was incorporated as a city. Before that the place was Bullhook Bottoms, a lowland where a creek ran into the Milk River. The creek starts at a butte southeast of town that regional Native Americans called Bullhook, from the legend of a bull bison gouging out its middle. When the Great Northern Railway made the spot a major stop, James J. Hill wanted the name changed. The first meeting on a new name broke up in a brawl, according to the 1976 county history “Grit, Guts and Gusto.” At the second meeting the vote went to the five original homesteaders. Joe Demars proposed “France,” which was voted down. Gus Decelles then offered the name of his parents’ hometown, Le Havre, the harbor, and the town took it.