Irish Days

On a Friday evening in June, members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians lay a stripe of Irish green down the center of Wallace Street in Virginia City, Montana. Wallace is the main street of the old gold camp and the highway through town, and anyone who comes by may help paint. In 2026 the painting ran from 6:30 to 7 p.m. on June 12. It opened the weekend that the town’s chamber of commerce lists as the Irish Day Celebration and the Bale of Hay Saloon calls Irish Days. In 2017 the Hibernians’ own newsletter called it the Virginia City Irish Weekend.

Flag, Mass and a potato feed

On Saturday the stripe is put to use. The Southwest Montana travel guide gave the 2026 program. It opened with a flag raising at 10 a.m. at the Madison County Courthouse, the two-story brick building of 1875 with a cupola and a columned porch. A National Register nomination describes it as dominating the main street from the east end. At 11 a.m. came Mass at the Thomas Francis Meagher House on Idaho Street, followed by a potato feed at the Bale of Hay. The guide adds that there are often bagpipers in town.

The parade left the Bale of Hay at 1:30 p.m. The chamber’s schedule ran the day from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with food vendors, live music, and the Tiernan Irish Dancers. By the saloon’s June posting, Katie Hall played there from noon to 2 and the Pickle Band from 3 to 5. Ryan Little Eagle played the next afternoon, June 14, from 1 to 4.

The saloon where the parade begins

The Bale of Hay stands at 344 West Wallace and bills itself as Montana’s oldest watering hole. Its own timeline begins in 1869 with the J.F. Stoer Saloon, run by Henry Schwenk until 1890. Stoer sold the building to Henry Werken in 1888. In the 1890s Smith & Boyd took it over. They owned the livery stable next door to the west, so they named their saloon the Bale of Hay. That stable is today the Virginia City Opera House. From 1908 the building sat vacant. In 1946 Charlie Bovey bought it, added the front porch, and reopened it as a working saloon. According to Wikipedia, the bar scenes in Little Big Man (1970) were filmed there.

In 1983 a fire broke out in the back. Firefighters from Virginia City, Sheridan, and Alder held it to the rear of the building, but the roof was destroyed. To reopen, the saloon had to meet current building codes. A new structure, with a four-foot concrete foundation and stud walls, was built inside the old shell. Above it went a tin ceiling taken from the Mint Saloon in Great Falls. The saloon says the front and exterior are still original.

Bovey bought many buildings besides this one. The town began on May 26, 1863, when a prospecting party camped beside a small stream fringed with alders. William Fairweather dug dirt from a rimrock and told Henry Edgar to wash the pan, hoping for enough gold to buy tobacco. The first pan turned up $2.40. On June 16 the Varina Town Company platted a town that its Confederate-minded founders meant to name for Jefferson Davis’s wife. The newly elected miners’ court judge, Dr. G. G. Bissell, was a Unionist, and he filed the name Virginia instead. Virginia City was the territorial capital from 1865 to 1875. After that it dwindled as the gold played out.

Charlie and Sue Bovey of Great Falls began buying and stabilizing its buildings in the early 1940s. The state’s visitor center named for the couple dates their first visit to 1944. On May 16, 1997, Montana completed a $6.5 million purchase of the Bovey properties. The Montana Heritage Commission now owns the Bale of Hay, and various operators have run it each summer.

The Hibernians from Helena

The weekend is presented by the Thomas Francis Meagher Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in Helena. Its partners are the Virginia City Chamber of Commerce, the Bale of Hay, and the businesses and people of the town. The division’s newsletter, the Shillelagh Sentinel, printed the full program for June 9 through 11, 2017. It described the event as an annual trip “to do community service in cleaning up around the Meagher’s cabin and submerge ourselves into Irish culture, dance, music, and history.” That year the theme was Meagher himself: “who he was, where he came from and what he meant to Ireland, Virginia City, the State of Montana and America.”

The 2017 Friday began with the clean-up at the cabin on west Idaho Street from 1 to 5. Then came Celtic music by the Dillon Fiddlers at the Bale of Hay, and then the laying of the stripe. The evening ended at the Torch Theater. There the Irish Studies Program at the University of Montana showed illustrated panels on Meagher’s life, and Tom Robison and Richard Burke of Bozeman played fiddle music linking Ireland to territorial Montana.

Saturday opened with speeches and the Irish flag raised at the courthouse. An outdoor Mass followed at the AOH Mass Rock at the cabin, then a “Baked Montana/Irish Potato Bar” lunch at the saloon. The parade followed the green stripe along Wallace Street, and anyone could march. A Bozeman trio sang “Songs of the Civil War” three times at the Elling House: Alice Hanks Allen on fiddle and vocals, Jim McMillan on guitar, and Phil Schladweiler on banjo. The Shamrockers of Polson played the saloon until 11:30 p.m. Sunday Mass was at St. Mary of the Assumption in Laurin.

The same issue carried a warning from the division’s president, Pat Flaherty. He wrote that participation in such events was “falling off,” and that the members had made their commitments a year before: “we need to follow through or we could be in Dire Straights.”

A governor lost at Fort Benton

Meagher had been a political activist in his native Ireland and a Union general in the Civil War. He came to Montana in September 1865 as the first territorial secretary, appointed by President Andrew Johnson. He soon became acting governor and lived on Idaho Street while the capital sat at Virginia City. The Montana Historical Society’s marker at 212 West Idaho Street calls him “a brilliant orator and a dashing, controversial figure amongst stormy partisan loyalties.”

On July 1, 1867, he disappeared from the deck of a steamship at Fort Benton. His widow searched the river’s edges for his body in vain, and his fate remains unknown. Mrs. Meagher bought the couple’s Virginia City home and returned East. The house burned about 1905. Charles Bovey rebuilt it of square-hewn logs on the original site in 1945, and the Helena Hibernians adopted it. The town’s preservation crew began work on the cabin in 2017 and 2018.

On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1866, Meagher spoke at the People’s Theatre in Virginia City. Colonel Thomas Thoroughman introduced him. Thoroughman was president of the Catholic committee and an ex-Confederate soldier. The Sentinel reprinted the address from a newspaper of the time. Meagher recalled an earlier St. Patrick’s Day spent in the forests of Tasmania, “which her gracious majesty of Great Britain enabled me to visit, having placed a sloop-of-war at my disposal.” In his mind, a lake there became Killarney. “Every foreign Irishman goes home on St. Patrick’s Day,” he told the crowd. “There’s not one of you in Montana. There’s not one of you has seen the Rocky Mountains this morning.” And then: “The Rocky Mountains have gone for the day, and won’t be back till midnight.”