Jefferson County Rodeo

Half a mile south of Boulder, off Highway 69, a round white building stands to the right of the fairgrounds entrance. Inside, under yellow and red poles, a blue horse gallops on a refinished wooden deck and another bares its teeth. The horses are cast aluminum. Every August the carousel turns for the Jefferson County Fair and Rodeo, which the fair board calls “A Fair of the Heart.” It runs on grounds officially named the Jefferson County Recreation Park.

The park is open all year. It has picnic tables, swings, a volleyball net, a miniature golf course, and trees and a gazebo for shade. Restrooms are open in the summer months, and campers pay the on-site caretaker on arrival. Around the lawns stand the buildings of an old working ranch. The red horse barn dates from 1914, and the long White Barn is also called the Loafing Barn. A onetime chicken coop, 205 feet long and nearly a century old, now holds storage. The fair office occupies the original milking parlor. In 2024 the county fitted the granary with new metal soffits to keep barn swallows from nesting under its eaves. The swallows returned and built hundreds of mud nests anyway. “They told me it would work,” County Events Director Bruce Binkowski told The Monitor. “Apparently, it didn’t.”

Four days in August

The Whitehall Ledger called the 2026 edition the community’s biggest event: the 42nd Annual Jefferson County Fair and Rodeo, August 20 to 23. Admission to the grounds was free, with $2 per car for parking. The program began the day before, on Wednesday, with a 4-H dog show, an open class dog show, and the Big Rock Barrel Race at 6 p.m. On Thursday, 4-H members showed hogs, cattle, lambs and goats, then cats, rabbits and poultry in the Livestock Arena. That evening brought the free Big Deal In-County Rodeo, which the Ledger called the crowd favorite. It is open to Jefferson County residents and former contestants. Its events include goat tying, team penning, ladies breakaway, steer riding for those 14 and under, cow riding, ladies cow riding, team branding, two-head progressive team roping, and ribbon roping, in which one team member must be a woman.

Friday began with a fundraiser breakfast at the concession stand. Then came the kids’ horse show and the kids’ rodeo in the arena, a free floral design class for children, squash decorating in the Red Barn, and Andy Larson on the fair stage. Saturday filled the day:

• A clown and magic show at the gazebo.
• A kids’ parade at 12:50, gathering at City Hall and ending at the Boulder Library, with prizes for all. The Rodeo Parade followed down Main Street at 1 p.m.
• On the fair stage: The Huckleberries, the Tiernan Irish Dancers, Professor Flim Flam, and a run of bands into the evening.
• The Boulder River Quilting Guild in the Boiler Building.
• The 4-H livestock sale outside the livestock barn at 3 p.m.
• A beef barbecue by the Jefferson High School music department in the White Barn, with music by Rich Matoon and Mary Popoulos.

At 3:30 the baked goods auction opened in the Red Barn. There, by the Ledger’s account, “local businesses and neighbors good-naturedly compete to spend the most money on delicious prize-winning goodies.” The money goes to fairgrounds improvements. On Sunday the Boulder River Carousel committee served breakfast. Small children rode in a stick horse rodeo at the playground, hunted in the hay at noon, and watched Toni Person Puppets in the Red Barn.

The exhibit halls charge nothing to enter, and every exhibit gets a ribbon. Purple ribbons carry a $10 premium, and superintendents choose “heart” winners. Many special awards keep the names of past supporters. The Mick McCauley Memorial Award goes to the champion pie. The all-around stick horse winner, aged 3 and under, takes home a handmade stick horse donated by Linda Wyrick. In 2026 the board added two prizes for longtime exhibitors who died that year, Bobby Sutherlin and Dean Grenz. “Bobby brought incredible floral arrangements as well as gorgeous quilts,” said board co-chair Leah Compton. “Dean brought beautiful produce from his garden every year.”

The Jefferson County Rodeo Association’s NRA rodeo runs at 6 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Saturday’s performance is followed by the Wild Ride. The Northern Rodeo Association’s 2026 schedule listed Boulder for August 21 and 22, a week after Deer Lodge and Livingston. The 2026 grand marshal was Adam Pallister, born in 1959 and raised in Boulder, who still lives on the family ranch. His favorite part, the association wrote, has always been visiting with friends and neighbors.

The arena got lights in 2024. The year before, spectators at the Saturday rodeo had squinted through the gloaming. According to association president Brady Nordahl, the last bull rider could not see much either, since the only light came from floods on the announcer’s stand. Six LED lamps now circle the oval. They cost about $15,000, paid by the rodeo association, the fair board, and federal ARPA funds.

The White Barn on Saturday night

The barn dance starts at 8 p.m. on Saturday in the White Barn, on a concrete floor, for $2. Clint Rieder and The Longhorn Band play it. The custom is older than the fair. “There has always been a barn dance,” Ellen Rae Thiel of the Boulder Heritage Center told The Monitor in 2023. “So were the square dances in the red barn.”

Before the dances joined the fair, they were community dances, usually with a potluck. The musician Gary Craft remembered the hootenannies put on by the Montana Fiddlers Association, where his father, Harold, was one of 25 fiddlers. “The hootenannies would go from 6 p.m. to midnight,” Craft said. “It was always incredible to me how many people stayed on the dance floor the whole night.” Rieder grew up attending. “It’s a family dance,” he said. “Everyone brings their kids.” Terry Minow, chair of the fair board since its creation, said in 2023: “A real barn dance is a rare treat these days.”

A ranch below the state school

Avery Belcher began working this land in 1882. S.F. Tuttle bought the ranch in 1901, after he was elected county treasurer. The sources differ on what happened next. The Monitor’s 2021 history, drawn from a compilation by founding board member Marilyn McCauley, says the state bought the ranch from Tuttle in 1908. By then many of its buildings were 20 years old and dilapidated. A 2024 Monitor article says the Montana School for the Deaf and Dumb bought the property in 1907.

From 1886 on, the state had been building institutions for disabled Montanans along both sides of the Boulder River, just north of the ranch. The ranch became part of that system. By the end of 1914 it had a slaughterhouse, a refrigeration plant and a horse barn. By 1924 it had a dormitory and the adjoining Merrill ranch. Residents of the nearby institutions worked it, growing crops and keeping a herd of cattle. The school, later called the Boulder River School and Hospital, declined over the decades. The historian Linda Sargent Wood describes “dark, dilapidated dungeons of shame,” where forced sterilization was commonplace. As residents returned to their home communities, the state ended ranch operations in 1971. The property sat empty for a decade, open to vandals and weather.

Bed frames, straw and watermelon

A group of Boulder residents pushed the county to take the property on. In March 1981 the county signed a lease with the state Department of Institutions. A state grant paid for restrooms, a picnic area and an arena, and the first rodeo was held that August. “It was a real struggle to get a fair and rodeo grounds in Boulder,” recalled founding board member Alice Rieder. “There were a lot of people who opposed it.” Another founding member, Dixie Rennie, remembered pushback from local citizens, from the south end of the county, and from commissioners.

The fair board formed in 1983. A first fair was planned that year but postponed to 1984 for lack of funding. “The early days of the Fair Board were concentrated on refurbishing the buildings,” Minow said. “They were full of old bed frames and other discarded materials from the Boulder River School.” Most of the windows were broken. The Square Dance Club cleaned out the Red Barn first, and for the first few years it held all the indoor exhibits. 4-H families shoveled out the livestock buildings.

The first official Jefferson County Fair and Boulder Rodeo ran August 24 to 26, 1984. “The 4-H kids gathered the animals and projects that they had left after going to the Twin Bridges fair to make it look like a fair,” Rieder said. “We had kids eating watermelon that didn’t even like watermelon.”

The board took over full management of the park in 1988. In 2005 the state transferred ownership to the county. “Before that,” Minow said, “the Fair Board was operating on faith that the state wouldn’t change its mind and take back the grounds with all the improvements we had made.”

Pots and pans for a carousel

The carousel came from the same state institution. In the 1950s Dr. Arthur Westwell, the school’s superintendent, decided its students would enjoy an amusement park. He had maintenance foreman Harold Jessen build a Ferris wheel, a swan boat and a road-ready train. The school could not afford a 40-foot carousel from the Allan Herschell Company. So Jessen’s crew, with no carousel experience, built one on nights and weekends, using the Columbia Gardens carousel in Butte as a blueprint. Boulder residents gave old pots and pans to be melted down for the animals and chariots, along with scrap aluminum from a nearby mining company. Westwell wrote to Aaron “Scoops” Brill and got discounted Brill molds for the horses. The finished carousel cost $2,430. The Monitor dates its first run to 1959 in one account and its building to 1958 in another.

As the institution’s residents became mostly adults, the amusement park fell apart. The Ferris wheel was shipped away and the swan boat disappeared. The train still runs in Boulder parades. The carousel sat dormant until the state planned to get rid of it. In 1995 the volunteer fire department, led by chief Bruce Gilmer, moved it to the fairgrounds with the fair board. “He remembered as a kid being able to go out there and ride this merry-go-round,” his widow, Donna Gilmer, said. “He just thought that it was worth saving.”

Townspeople bought horses to paint themselves. Ten horses too damaged to repair were recast from the same Brill molds. Gov. Mark Racicot cut the ribbon in 1996. For twelve years the carousel stood in the open, and volunteers removed and stored the horses after each use. Gilmer’s crew roofed it in 2008, and later volunteers added walls; the 2024 account dates the enclosure to 2015. The building’s inner walls tell the story of the carousel’s construction, abandonment and revival.