Marias Fair

The 85th Marias Fair opened on Thursday, July 16, 2026, on Main Street in Shelby. At 11 a.m. the Pet and Doll Parade, a children’s procession free to enter, formed up by the Catholic Church at the west end of the street and made its way to City Park, where the Marias Vet Clinic provided ice cream and a bounce house stood ready. The 2026 theme was Red, White and Boots. The fair runs three days at the Marias Fairgrounds just east of town and is shared by four counties of the Hi-Line: Toole, Pondera, Liberty and Glacier.

Thursday night in the arena

By evening the crowd had moved to the grandstands for Wacky Western Night: Sweetheart Races, Calf Dressing, the Rawhide Race, a Candy Bar Race, Young Guns steer riding for ages 12 to 18, a Ranch Rodeo, and a chicken race. The fair’s posted rules describe each one. In the ranch rodeo scramble, a stock trailer sits in the middle of the arena and three steers wait at the far end. A team must load one steer and latch the gate, head and tie down a second with a three-leg cross tie, and head, heel and chalk-mark the third. In the Sweetheart Race one partner waits on a barrel at the far end until the rider comes down to pick them up. The rider on the rawhide must wear a helmet. Calf-dressing teams wait for calves to come out of the bucking chutes in halters, then work each calf’s head and both front legs into a T-shirt dyed the team’s color. The chicken race is for children, who come down from the stands and circle the arena fence while chickens are set loose in the middle. “This event is as country as it gets,” the rules say. “If you catch a chicken you can take it home.”

The 2026 Thursday program carried $4,000 in added money, $2,000 of it in the ranch rodeo, paid out in cash. “This will pay like a slot machine,” the fair’s page announced. Entries went by text to Remington Campbell, who chairs the fair board. When the chickens were caught, a local band, Useless ID’s, played in front of the grandstands. Tickets at the gate are cash only.

The Marias River Stampede

The fair’s rodeo, the Marias River Stampede, is sanctioned by the NRA and runs Friday and Saturday nights at 7, with slack at 10 on Saturday morning. Jacobs Rodeo provides the stock. On the 2026 day sheets the announcer was Chad Scarborough, the board’s vice chairman. Tobin Arnold and Martin Murphy judged, Dakota Dixon and Aaron Conners fought bulls, and Augare and Holzheimer worked as pickup men. Most of the contestants came from Montana towns such as Cut Bank, Browning, Heart Butte, Choteau, Fortine and Wolf Creek, though some entered from as far as Stephenville and Wickenburg. Campbell himself was drawn in tie-down roping and in team roping with Danni Campbell, both of Shelby. Before the fair opened, Harmon Weld Co and Blake Harmon repaired the alley gates behind the bucking chutes “so that you can sort horseback and not hit your head,” as the fair thanked them.

Gates open at 5:30. Children under 8 and adults over 80 get in free. Friday of 2026 was a “Tough Enough to Wear Pink” night. The sources disagree on who played after that rodeo. The Cut Bank Pioneer Press, writing ahead of the fair, named Levi Blom, a country singer-songwriter born and raised in Butte. The fair’s own post that afternoon announced Jolie Blue. Jolie Blue had also played after the Friday rodeo in 2025, and the fair’s biography describes him as a grain-country singer from the RM of Eyebrow, Saskatchewan, who sings of “the feuds with Viterra” and who “just may however, write a song about something you said.”

On Saturday night, Logan Health and the fair board asked the crowd to wear purple for a suicide awareness and prevention rodeo. Mental health resources were on hand, along with people to talk to. At halftime, teams from the sheriff’s office, the firefighters and the Border Patrol held a calf-dressing competition. Spectators bid on the teams in a Calcutta at the start of the rodeo, “so have your money ready and your hands in the air,” the fair advised. Cole Kleinert & The Slow Riders, a local act, played afterward, and the fair closed with its firework show. The next morning the fair’s page relayed a call to watch for Rozzie, a red-and-white border collie who had run off during the fireworks. A later update read: “She has been found thank you guys!”

A post on the fair’s page after the 2026 rodeo, written by a board member in their fourth year on the board, measured how the rodeo had grown: “5 years ago we had 3 calf ropers this year 28.”

Barns, the Mercantile and the 4-H Food Booth

From 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. each day, the exhibit building, animal barns and arenas hold the 4-H shows. The 4-H Food Booth serves from 6:30 a.m. until 8 p.m. Other food stands on the grounds include KJ’s Chicken Chariot, Frey Guys Funnel, Dale Dogs, LH Legacy Grill, Hucklebeary Creamery, Food Dudes, Main Squeeze Lemonade, The Rolling Cones, Glacier Freeze and Pizza Hut Shelby. Two play areas with bounce houses, the Adventure Zone and Pirates Rebellion, are free and run from Thursday at 11 a.m. through Saturday at 10 p.m.

Open Class is the entry division for residents of all ages from the four counties, and it costs nothing to enter. Exhibitors show wool, baked and preserved foods, photography, crafts, wood and metal work, poultry, waterfowl and rabbits, farm crops, garden produce, and cut flowers. Winners take ribbons and premium money, and they can cash their checks at the Open Class office. In 2025 the superintendent, Mary DeStaffany, moved nearly all of Open Class into one building, the Mercantile; only the chickens, rabbits and eggs stayed elsewhere. She also began choosing a yearly theme. The first was chickens: “After all-Open Class is something to cackle about!”

Saturday starts back on Main Street, where the Marias Fair Parade lines up by the fire hall and steps off at 11 a.m. At the fairgrounds, the 4-H Livestock Auction is held in the Seewald Barn, with a social at 1:30 p.m. and bidding at 3. The 2026 fair added its first Corn Hole Calcutta that afternoon. Sign-up opened at 4:30, “Bags Fly at 5,” and the final four teams went up for bids before the rodeo.

A $500 fairground and its wooden grandstands

Accounts differ on the fair’s first year. The fair’s own website says it debuted in the summer of 1941, and Visit Montana gives the same date. In 2016, Treasure State Lifestyles told a longer story. On February 8, 1938, the Toole County commissioners held their first meeting about buying fairgrounds. The county secured the land for $500, the Works Progress Administration cleaned up the site and built on it, and the county held the first Marias Fair that summer. According to the magazine, the fair’s early years were a meeting ground where the area’s agriculturists sold goods and traded ideas, and the county’s 4-H program was central to it from the start. The fair took a short hiatus during World War II. When it came back, it added a carnival, rodeo, demolition derby, fireworks and concerts over the years, and Pondera, Glacier and Liberty counties joined Toole in running it.

The same article reported that the original wooden grandstands from the 1938 fair were still in use, with repairs. “We have one of the oldest wooden grandstands in the state,” former county commissioner Buster Brown said. He was just as proud of the 4-H Fat Livestock Auction, where members sell the cattle, sheep and pigs they have raised and put the money toward college. “It’s a great auction and we’ve come to be known for it,” Brown said. The 75th fair ran July 20–24, 2016.

The board has long drawn on Shelby’s own families. Jean Paul Gerlough, a petroleum geologist who came from Idaho for the Sunburst-Kevin oil boom of the 1920s and ‘30s and never left, sat on the Marias Fair Board for years, according to his daughter Rea’s obituary. On July 1, 2020, the board met under the grandstands. A member reported that they needed paint and new spray foam, and the ticket booth needed tin for its roof. The fair was canceled that year. “We actually had a really hard time deciding to cancel it last year, but that was what needed to be done,” fair director Ramona Kinyon told KRTV when it returned on July 22, 2021, under the parade theme “Toole Time – Built to Last!”

The 2021 fair ran through Sunday, July 25. It had a PRCA rodeo with trick riders, a Shelby FFA barbacoa competition, and pony rides at the 4-H horse arena. The board’s minutes also record an Indian Relay show booked for Thursday night. A demolition derby on the last day included a Power Wheels derby for small children. The fireworks planned to follow it were canceled for extreme fire danger.

The rest of the year, the grounds take in overnight livestock boarding and winter vehicle storage. They also host junior high and high school rodeos, weddings, tractor pulls, the Shrine Circus, and the Shelby Area Chamber of Commerce Haunted House.