Victor Days

The park a block off Highway 93

Victor Days filled the park in Victor, Montana, a block off US Highway 93 at 170 South Tudor, on Friday, August 7, 2026, from two in the afternoon until eight, and again on Saturday from ten until six. The program was a vendor market in rows of 10-by-10 spaces, with live music both days, a beer garden, a coffee stand, face painting, and bouncy houses. There were races for small entrants: miniature radio-controlled cars, dragon racing, and stick horses.

The event is run by Treasure Chest Events, the outfit of Gina Deschamps. She and Steve are the names on the phone line. The company stages craft and vendor markets across western Montana, most of them in the event center at the Ravalli County Fairgrounds in Hamilton. Victor Days is one of its few outdoor events.

Friday at six in the evening brought what the organizers called the latest addition to Victor Days: valve cover racing. In their words it is a “Gravity-Powered Competition where real engine valve covers are transformed into custom racers and sent down a track Head-to-head.” It was open to all ages.

Candy on foot, trucks by the post office

The parade stepped off at 11 a.m. on Saturday, August 8, after judging at 10:30. Entrants checked in on the grass by the school. The theme posted on the parade page was “Blaze of Glory (Red, White, & Blue).” Entries came as floats, horseback riders, novelty acts, marchers, dancers, gymnasts, walkers, antique vehicles, and classic tractors and old farm equipment. An announcer read a short description of each one. Entrants carried signs, banners, balloons, flags, and matching t-shirts so the crowd could tell who they were. Performers could play along the route as long as they kept moving forward.

Candy was thrown only by people on foot, never from a moving vehicle or float. Every motorized entry had a licensed driver. Treasure Chest Events’ own page sums up the parade as “candy for the kids, music for the adults and an opportunity for politicians and veterans to reinforce our independence.”

The classic truck show ran from noon to three, at the post office and along the weed district lot. There were eight classes, four of them for trucks from 1980 and older. The trophies were custom-made, and Best of Show took $100 along with its trophy. Awards came at 3:30, and an owner had to be there to win.

Garfield, then Victor

The ground under the fair has a longer record. Lewis and Clark passed through the area in 1805 and 1806. Among the first settlers were A. Stearns Blake and his wife Mary, who acquired a 320-acre parcel through the Homestead Act of 1869. Frank Woody established the town in August 1881 and named it Garfield, after President James Garfield. By December 1881 it had been renamed Victor. Bitterroot Info says the name honors Chief Victor of the Bitterroot Salish Tribe. Visit Montana says only “a Flathead Indian chief.”

The Bitterroot rail line reached Victor in 1887. Silver and gold mining was booming west of town, and agriculture had come into the valley. Victor, in Bitterroot Info’s phrase, “was suddenly the depot where goods and transportation would meet.” In 1893 the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act brought mine closings and a downturn. Silver was still mined at the Curlew Mines until the 1940s.

Later the tracks moved to the east side of the Bitterroot River. The first depot had stood at the east end of Main Street, beside the old line. A new one went up in about 1928 at the east end of Victor Crossing, just east of the present Eastside Highway. Victor today is an unincorporated town in Ravalli County, at 3,419 feet, 10 miles north of Hamilton and 32 south of Missoula. Bitterroot Info counts 867 people in town and 3,764 in its zip code. Visit Montana gives 948.

A depot over Bell Crossing

“The trail of information concerning Victor’s last depot grows dim as does much of the history of Victor itself,” wrote Joann White Hosko, in a paper the Victor Heritage Museum keeps as its history.

By the 1980s the 1928 Northern Pacific depot was long abandoned. It belonged to the Stansbury Corporation, a Louisiana mining company that had planned to mine vermiculite on the Skalkaho. The company gave up the project and used the building, roughly, for storage.

Peggy Thornbrugh, a Victor resident and postal worker, wanted a museum for the town. She learned that Alvin and Ruth Cote would donate two lots at the corner of South Blake and Main. On September 10, 1989, she called a meeting at her home with Hosko, Paul Thrailkill, and Richard and Heide Reed. They became the first officers. Jeff Langton, a Victor attorney and historian-author, drew up the papers. The Cotes deeded over the lots, and Stansbury agreed to give the depot.

KPAX reports that a year of bake sales and auctions raised the $2,000 needed to move the building. The move was set for October 1990 and finally took place on December 10. The depot came over Bell Crossing because the bridges on Victor Crossing could not carry it. Over the next eighteen months, dozens of volunteers cleaned, painted, shingled, remodeled, and wired it. Hosko’s paper dates the open house to May 1992. KPAX says the museum opened to the public the winter of the move. The formal dedication came on August 11, 1996, in nearly 100-degree heat under forest fire smoke that Hosko described as “nearly opaque.”

The museum stands at 125 Blake Street, two blocks west of the highway on Main. It is open summer afternoons and charges no admission. The exhibits cover mining, the railroad, and Native American history. One section describes family life at the Curlew Mines, where board president Suzanne Tout grew up. The museum also tells of the Salish and of Chinese American workers. Victor yearbooks on display show volunteers Hosko and Liz Ingraham in school together. Ingraham has lived in Victor since 1949 and remembers the first lights coming on across the valley. About ten volunteers keep the place running, all of them older adults. The museum holds an ice cream social on the last Sunday in August.

“I see this museum, the building, the entity, the whole thing, as my baby,” Hosko told KPAX. Her father, she said, was a great storyteller of what had happened in Victor. “Well, if you don’t preserve it... when it’s gone, it’ll be gone.”