Prairie County Fair

The Prairie County Fairgrounds lie north of Terry. They sit past Interstate 94, past old U.S. Highway 10, and north again of that, on the abandoned and almost vanished rail bed of the Milwaukee Road. The barns and grandstands are plain buildings, painted white. The address is 31 Fairgrounds Road.

Through most of the year the grounds hold open houses, gun shows, agriculture appreciation days, concerts, dances, graduation parties, rodeos, horse clinics, family reunions, demolition derbies, and 4-H events. Each August the county fair comes. It calls itself “The Biggest Little Fair in All of Eastern Montana.” The county’s fair page sets it on the first weekend of August. The 2025 fair ran August 1 to 3, and the 2026 fair ran Thursday through Sunday, August 6 to 9.

Four days in August

The 2026 fair opened at 10 on Thursday morning with the 4-H and Open Class horse show, and the Rodeo Queen Contest followed at 4 p.m. Friday began at 8 a.m. with the livestock show, where swine, sheep, goat, and beef classes were judged. At 4 p.m. the Sportsman’s Club ran a BB gun shoot for children at the trap range. At 6 came the 4-H Round Robin Showmanship Contest and the 4-H Awards Ceremony. At 7 the Terry Roping Club held its Roping Scramble, with fair food on the grounds.

Saturday started in town with a parade downtown at 10 a.m. under the theme “Patriots & Prairies: From Homestead to Homeland.” After it, fairgoers went out to the grounds for the Open Class and 4-H exhibits. Quilts of Valor quilts hung in the Ag Building. An exhibit on Prairie County women was on view in the Main Exhibit Building. The Terry Roping Club’s Ranch Rodeo drew local cowboys. The Terry Tribune listed it for the afternoon, while the fair’s own Facebook page put the youth events at 9:30 a.m. and the adult events at noon. At 4:30 p.m. 4-H members sold their market livestock. At 8 the Barstool Cowboys played on the midway, and the fair board invited the crowd to “kick up your heels on the dance ‘floor’ or just sit back and listen.” Bounce MC inflatables stood on the grounds Saturday and Sunday afternoons.

Sunday opened with a Quilts of Valor presentation at 9 a.m. and a community church service at 10. Both were held at the Bob Lindvig memorial picnic pavilion, between the Main Exhibit Building and the Close-Up food booth. Bleachers and benches were set out, and people brought their own lawn chairs. The Homemaker Pie and Baked Goods Auction followed at noon in the same place. At 1 p.m. the Bump N Run started in front of the grandstands. Between its heats ran motorcycle races organized by Owen Devlin.

Community groups and individuals run the concession stands. The fair board sits under chairman Travis Choat, with Bill Rauch as grounds caretaker. Sharla Sackman, the fair manager, is also the county’s Extension agent. “We hope you join us at ‘The Biggest Little Fair in all of Eastern Montana!’” she said before the 2026 fair.

Noodles in a coffee cup

Among the food at the fair, one dish has lasted half a century. Miki Lantis came to Terry from Japan in 1973 with her husband, Bruce, and their young son, Waylon. About a year later she wanted money of her own for Christmas and birthday presents, and Bruce objected. “He said this was cowboy country, and they never had noodles and stuff,” she told the Terry Tribune. “That hurt my feelings. So I decided to do it anyway.”

In the summer of 1975 she set up a stand in the State Bank of Terry parking lot. She sold Japanese noodles, made with spaghetti and beef, in Styrofoam coffee cups for 25 cents. They sold out almost at once. The soy sauce and spices ate the whole take, so she raised the price to 75 cents and then to $1.

Her biggest event of the year has always been the Prairie County Fair. In the years she worked outside the home, she spent her evenings preparing for the fair booth. “I chopped cabbage, onions and carrots for a couple hours each night,” she said. “In those days, I did everything (with my) hands.” Her children, and later their families, scooped, sold, and served through the long, hot fair days. A longtime customer, the late Ellen Wilson, put it this way: “If we don’t eat Miki’s noodles, it cannot be the fair.”

In 2021 her grandson Layne Lantis started Miki’s Food Truck, which carries her recipes to events across eastern Montana. “The noodles are still number one,” he said.

A pavilion for the sound man

The pavilion where the Sunday auction now runs carries the name of Robert “Bob” Lindvig of Fallon, born January 14, 1954. He graduated from Terry High School in 1972 and took over his father’s farm in 1985. After he retired from farming in 2013, according to his obituary, he took up being the “go to sound man” for Prairie County. He was the sound man for the fair for many years. He also announced at bump and runs, demolition derbies, and tractor pulls, and he served as an auctioneer at local fundraisers. “Nothing drove him more nuts then going somewhere and the sound system wasn’t working right,” the obituary reads.

He died at home on June 25, 2020. His celebration of life was held at the fairgrounds that August 13. “He was one of those jack-of-all-trades people,” Sackman said.

His family gave money for a memorial and sought help from the Eastern Plains Economic Development Corporation. Two $5,000 grants paid for the first materials and a new concrete slab. Before that, Sackman said, there had been only “a crumbling cement slab from an old office building that had been torn down that we would put a tent over to try to provide some shade and space.” Lindvig had helped run the pie auction on that old slab. The 2022 fair was the first to use the new one.

Since then the pavilion has gone up piece by piece, as money came in. As of 2024 it had a shingled roof and concrete supports under its four posts. Electricity and a ceiling to keep out roosting birds were still to come. Two convertible benches were bought before the 2024 fair, and the family hoped to raise enough for eight. Volunteers did almost all of the work, including contractors and fair board members who gave their time. “It relates directly to the volunteer work that Bob did,” Sackman said.

Barns along the Milwaukee

In 2013 the blog Montana’s Historic Landscapes wrote that county residents had come to Terry every summer for the fair for more than 75 years. The fairgrounds owe their site to the railroads. At Terry the Milwaukee Road crossed the main line of the Northern Pacific Railway. Entrepreneurs tried to build a new commercial corridor facing the Milwaukee tracks, just north of the Northern Pacific route. Those plans never panned out, except for the fairgrounds. The barns, grandstands, and other buildings rose along the Milwaukee line and still stand there. Because the setting is intact, the post counted the fairgrounds among the few fully extant properties left along the old Milwaukee line in that part of Montana.