Huntley Homesteader Days

On the second weekend in July, beef turns on a spit in Homesteader Park outside Huntley, Montana, and members of the Huntley Project Lions Club flip chickens on the pit beside it. “There’s a lot of people that stand there and watch the beef go around, and around, and around, and (watch) us flipping the chickens,” said Jack Toogood, a club member for about 40 years. The spit came off a piece of farm equipment. “It’s got gears on it, put a motor on the end; turns the stems,” said Dan Krum, 58 years with the club, who remarked that it could stand among the museum pieces on display at the park. Krum and Toogood said the pits are the same ones used at the first Homesteader Days. For the 60th annual celebration, club members estimated they would cook about 100 pounds of beef and 400 pounds of chicken and feed thousands of people by the weekend’s end.

The park covers seven acres at 760 Railroad Highway. From the Roundup Highway, Highway 312 runs east 12 miles. The park lies on the right, just across the railroad tracks, beside the Southern Agricultural Research Center, with the Huntley Project Museum and Homesteader Hall at hand. The club maintains both hall and park. Shade trees fill the grounds. Michael Foth of Cat Country 102.9 called them giant cottonwoods: “On a hot July afternoon, plopping your lawn chair down in that cool shade is worth its weight in gold.”

Friday night under the trees

Homesteader Days opens with an outdoor country concert. For the 62nd annual edition, on July 10, 2026, gates opened at 4:30 p.m. Chancey Williams played at 6:30, Darryl Worley at 8:00, and Exit 53 took the stage at 10:00 for an after-party that ran until 1:00 a.m. The club billed that night as a celebration of “250 years of America’s Freedom!”

Seating is open and goes to whoever arrives first. Chairs are allowed but not provided, a few bleachers stand on the grounds, and the crowd may stand in front of the main stage. Food is sold for cash, with an ATM at the gate and another inside. Once in, a visitor may not leave and return. The club warns that the park cools off after sunset. Bethany Hein, a club member, described the crowd in 2016: concertgoers stake out ground under the trees, then wander around to visit and buy beverages. It is, she said, a free-flowing, loosely structured, casual affair. “The venue makes the concert,” she said. In 2021 the club hoped to fill a maximum capacity of 3,500.

Saturday in Homesteader Park

Saturday starts at 8:15 a.m. with the Homesteader Run, two miles around the State Experiment Station. Gates open at 10:00, and entry is $2 at the gate. The craft and vendor show runs until 4:00. At 11:00 the parade lines up on the east side of the park and runs right through it. A $75 first prize goes in each of five classes: floats; old cars and restored autos and trucks; machinery; horse units and riders; and marching units. The 2021 theme was “Country Crazy,” and that year a paraglider flew the U.S. flag during the national anthem as the color guard stood.

After the parade, Songdog Serenade played by the Coors Tent in 2026, and carnival games and rides for smaller children ran from noon to 6:30. There is bingo; in 2016 it was cow pie bingo. At 2:00, in front of the stage, Fun on the Farm brings out corn-stalk throwing, stick horse racing, and hula hooping for all ages. Marcus and Kate Vogel organized it in 2026.

The Lions Club sells its BBQ beef and BBQ chicken dinners. Local organizations sell hamburgers, tacos, nachos, pie and ice cream, and soft drinks, and the 2027 listing adds pulled pork. The beer garden opens at 11:00 a.m. Its patrons are invited to “pull up a stump and kick up some sawdust.” It pours draft Coors, Coors Light, and Blue Moon, and admits only those 21 and older with a valid ID. Drinks stay inside its bounds. From there a visitor can watch the parade with a cold beer.

The evening ran this way in 2026: the Tanglewood Band in the beer garden from 8:00 to midnight, a teen dance at the main stage from 9:00 to 11:00, and at 9:00 a live auction of items donated by Briggs Distributing. Fireworks go off at dusk, when fire conditions allow.

The pig and the bentonite

The greased pig race came at 5:30 p.m. in 2026. In 2016, the Last Best News described four-member teams trying to put a pig into a barrel in a pit filled with water and 500 pounds of bentonite. Hein, a competitor herself, said it isn’t too hard but would not say more. “I can’t tell you my trade secrets,” she said.

In 2026 the club held its second “Battle of the Bridge,” a greased-pig contest between high school teams. In its call for entries, the club reminded everyone that Shepherd had won the year before. A costume contest went with the race.

A drawing in 1907

The club’s account says the celebration honors pioneers who came “on foot, by covered wagon, or by immigrant train to carve out a fertile valley in a land of sagebrush and greasewood.” They came to the Huntley Project. According to a 1996 report by Timothy A. Dick of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, cited by the Last Best News in 2016, the federal government bought the land from the Crow Indian Reservation for $1.15 million. President Theodore Roosevelt opened it to farmers on May 21, 1907, in plots of 40 to 160 acres, and allotted them by drawing. Only 76 of the first 1,000 names drawn completed filing. Dick wrote that many who registered were curious Billings residents who only wanted to see what number they would draw.

Restrictions on entry were lifted in August 1907. According to the Huntley Project Museum, farmers came from all over Europe and the eastern United States. The government laid out the town sites of Huntley, Ballantine, and Pompeys Pillar to handle shipping and supplies. Water came from the Yellowstone River through a 10½-foot diversion dam near Huntley and a 32-mile main canal. Labor trouble, defaulting subcontractors, flooding, and poor early harvests slowed the work. After the First World War a depression drove down crop prices, and by 1923 the district’s population had been cut in half, to just over 1,000. Better crop years and the creation of the Huntley Project Irrigation District in 1927 began to turn things around. “Success of the project,” Dick wrote, “can be attributed to the ambitions and determination of the settlers who overcame strife to become successful farmers.”

From picnic to concert stage

The Lions Club’s own page says it organized the first Homesteader Days in 1964 as a memorial to those settlers. Hein said in 2016 that it began as a way for farmers and ranchers from around the project to get together to drink and socialize. “It was the community gathering event of the summer,” she said. Jon Susott, the club’s president, told it as a picnic: “60 years ago, all the homesteaders just decided to have a picnic,” he said, “(They decided to) enjoy the day and take a day off from getting ready for the grain harvest down in the valley.”

The original homesteaders are gone. The number of farmers has dropped as farms have grown larger, and the gathering has become a large community event with touring country acts at the top of the bill. Hein said vendors sold a hundred kegs of beer when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band played, and that they sold as much back when the event was a gathering of ranchers and farmers. Some old-timers, she said, mourn a loss of authenticity.

The record of the 2016 bill differs by source. The Last Best News listed Blackhawk and Aaron Tippin, with the local band Bucky Beaver and the Ground Grippers turning the concert into a dance afterward and gate tickets at $40. The museum’s events page listed Craig Morgan and the Gatlin Brothers. That year Exit 53 played the beer garden on Saturday night. In 2020 Covid-19 restrictions limited the celebration, but the club went ahead with sanitary measures and distancing, among the first groups in the state to hold a large event that summer. In 2021 Shenandoah headlined, with Little Texas opening and the Ground Grippers closing, and the club kept its wash stations.

Hein called Homesteader Days the club’s largest annual fundraiser and one of the largest for any Lions Club in Montana. Members estimate it has raised up to $300,000 for the community over six decades, and Susott said the club gives out about $15,000 in scholarships every year. The 63rd annual Homesteader Days is set for July 9 and 10, 2027.

“That’s the way they did it 60 years ago,” Susott said of the barbecue. “So, we’re just keeping up with the tradition.”