Homesteader Days Festival

On the second Saturday in September the Powell Eagles Aerie 2426 serves pancakes from 7 to 10 in the morning. By the time the plates are cleared, the streets around the Homesteader Museum in Powell, Wyoming, have filled with tractors. The museum is a log building at the corner of First and Clark streets, just off Highway 14A. Homesteader Days runs in the blocks around it from 10 a.m. until about 3 p.m., and admission is free. The 2026 festival, held September 12, was billed as the 15th annual. The museum counted more than 4,000 people that day, among them a group of students from Japan.

Tractors at First and Clark

The Rewinders, a local band, set up outside at the intersection of First and Clark around 10, and the museum invites people to dance in the street. Families bring vintage tractors and historic farm machinery out for the day. The 2026 guide map listed a hay press, a thresher and a tractor show, and a Powell Tribune photograph from 2025 shows farmer Lance Streets running a steam tractor. Weavers, spinners and a blacksmith demonstrate their work.

The Vehicle Visions Car Show lines up along the same streets. The show grew out of a club formed by local car enthusiasts who belong to the Eagles aerie, where the show started. The club and the aerie now co-host it.

Booths take up the rest of the street: artisans, farmers market stands and community tables. In 2026 they included the Byron Rock Shop, Larry’s Garden & Honey, the Yellowstone Weavers & Spinners, the Park County Archives, Heart Mountain, the Master Gardeners and the Open Studio Folk School, and University of Wyoming Extension was also on hand. Children have face painting, a cake walk and a barrel train. Townspeople donate vintage and antique items to a silent auction in the museum’s back courtyard, where bidding closes at 1. In 2025 the lots brought $548.

Food trucks park in a lot the museum calls the food court, beside the Eagles and Pathfinder Credit Union and across the street from the museum’s front doors. Museum director Brandi Wright told the Tribune that in 2026 she made a point of avoiding too much overlap in cuisine. The lineup ran from Havok BBQ and Ridge Runners Pizza to Let’s Eat Ramen, Island in Paradise and the Wild West Bitchin’ Kitchen, with kettle corn from Beartooth Concessions. The American Legion grilled hamburgers to raise money for its Patriot Community Center. At 12:15 the Homesteader Museum Association opens a booth in the street by the front doors and hands out free root beer floats until the ice cream runs out.

“It’s about celebrating harvest and celebrating our homesteader roots,” Wright said before the 2026 festival. “This is one of those events that I could not pull off if I didn’t have community support.”

Ruby Hopkin’s pies

On festival morning, bakers drop off homemade pies inside the museum. At 1:30 the pies go on the block in the Ruby Hopkin Commemorative Pie Auction. Bidders use paddles handed out at the information booth beside the front ramp. According to the museum, Ruby Hopkin came up with the idea of selling pies as a fundraiser in 2017 and believed it could raise “big” money. In 2025, 57 pies sold for $11,505. Nearly thirty bakers contributed that year, the Skyline Café among the home cooks, and Brad Lauk of One Off Hosting volunteered as auctioneer.

Many people told the museum they could never afford an auction pie, so the association started a raffle. It sets aside a few of the donated pies and draws a winner before the auction begins. In 2025, five raffle pies brought in more than $200.

The festival follows the museum’s Farm to Table dinner, a fundraiser for guests 21 and older. In 2026 Sarah Bear’s Farmhouse Kitchen cooked it from Big Horn Basin farm ingredients. The dinner sold 110 tickets that year, and when the Wyoming wind came up the diners moved inside. On the Sunday after the festival the museum holds its Second Sunday open house from noon to 4, with coffee, a craft circle and the galleries open.

A log hall built in 1933

The first festival is recorded as taking place on September 10, 2011. By 2025 attendance had reached 4,500, despite some rain, according to the Tribune.

The building at the center of it all was put up by the American Legion in 1933 as a community center, built of logs and hardwood. It has served as a banquet hall and a roller rink. During the Second World War it briefly held German prisoners of war until the camp at Deaver was ready. In July 1968 a group of Powell citizens began planning a museum devoted to homesteaders, early settlers and farmers. Since 1972 the museum has occupied the Legion hall.

The museum’s grounds now extend beyond the hall. Visitors may climb aboard a Chicago, Burlington & Quincy caboose. Nearby stand a sheepherder’s wagon, an outhouse and the Burchell & Ruby Hopkin Historic Equipment Museum building, which holds a blacksmith shop and a Park County jail cell from the era of Earl Durand. Durand, a Powell man, escaped the Cody jail in 1939 and killed two lawmen and two posse members. He died on March 24 of that year, after a shoot-out when he tried to rob Powell’s First National Bank.

The Bever Homestead, a furnished house that belonged to homesteaders O.E. and Ruby Bever, came to the museum in 2002. The museum dates the house to 1913; the Densho Encyclopedia dates it to 1911. The museum also keeps the documents, family histories and photographs of the Shoshone Reclamation Project. It has a permanent exhibit on the Japanese Americans held at the Heart Mountain detention center nearby.

Camp Colter and the canal

The Shoshone Reclamation Project made the town. In 1907 the United States Reclamation Service set up a work camp beside the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy tracks, on an arid flat a few miles north of the Shoshone River. It was named Camp Colter, for the mountain man John Colter. The workers dug canals, and on April 27, 1908, water ran through them.

That same year the service applied for a post office and found that another railroad siding already held the name Colter. The camp took the name of John Wesley Powell, the Grand Canyon explorer who had argued for federal reclamation. The service sold town lots on May 25, 1909, the date locals count as the founding, and the state incorporated Powell on May 10, 1910. By 1914 the Garland Division was complete, with 450 homesteads.

Agriculture remained Powell’s main livelihood. In 1923 the town became host of the Park County Fair under an agreement with Cody, the county seat, which took the Fourth of July celebration in return. During the 2026 festival the museum’s gallery held an exhibit titled “Prosperity of the Park County Fair – 100 year celebration.”