Looking forward to the 2018 Sugarbeet Festival? Let's also take a lookbackward

This year's Sugarbeet Festival, set for Friday and Saturday, September 7 and 8, will be the thirteenth edition of Chinook's celebration of the humble sugarbeet. The first festival was held in 2005. In the Festival's more than a decade-long history the event has gone through a few variations, but it still centers around the sugarbeet and the role of the sugary plant in the Milk River Valley.

A brief history of the sugarbeet in Blaine County

For readers not up to speed on the history of the sugarbeet in the area, interest in raising the sweet beet began in the early 1900's. For a variety of reasons, mostly involving water issues, sugarbeets were not commercially raised here until 1924. That's when Utah and Idaho Sugar officials got serious about building a processing plant in Blaine County. Usually a factory didn't come on line until beets were raised for three to five years, but a problem in Washington state opened the door for a processing plant to be built in Chinook the year after the first crop was raised in the area.

An infestation of leaf hoppers forced the beet plant in Yakima, Washington to shutdown for lack of product to process. The plant was moved to Chinook, in 100 railroad cars, and reassembled. Beet slicing operations began in the fall of 1925 and continued until the plant was again disassembled and moved back to Washington state, this time to Moses Lake, in 1952. Farmers continued to raise sugarbeets and ship them by rail car to Billings for processing until 1969. After 1969 sugarbeets were no longer grown commercially in the Milk River Valley.

Chuck Hewitt, "Father of the Sugarbeet Festival"

In 2014 when I was first asked to write about the festival for the "Journal," I was directed to speak with Chuck Hewitt, the acknowledged "Father of the Sugarbeet Festival." I found Hewitt having coffee with his regular morning group at the Chinook Senior Center. When asked about the beginnings of the Sugarbeet Festival he smiled and said "it all started with a song I heard on the radio. The song was Tracy Byrd's 1994 recording of "The Watermelon Crawl.""

Hewitt mused "The song was about a traveler who comes across a watermelon festival some place in Georgia. Part of the song was about drinking watermelon wine and crawling home rather than driving-just to be safe. I got to thinking that sugar is the main ingredient of wine and there's lots of sugar in sugarbeets. I began to form the idea to honor the legacy of sugarbeets in the Milk River valley with a community festival."

He took the idea of a festival to the Chinook Chamber of Commerce and "they liked it," Hewitt said. They liked it so well they elected Hewitt president of the group and put him in charge of getting the new festival going. And he did get the festival launched. The first Sugarbeet Festival was staged in early October, 2005, in conjunction with Chinook High's homecoming football game.

Hewitt said staging the festival in conjunction with CHS's homecoming didn't last very long. He explained "the high school often can't schedule a homecoming game until late in the summer or early fall. That made it difficult for festival organizers to set a date and begin planning their event. It got complicated and finally the two events were separated. We moved the Sugarbeet Festival to an earlier date just to improve the chances for good weather. Sometimes that's worked and sometimes it hasn't."

After that early visit with Hewitt I began to browse the newspaper archives at the "Journal" office to get a feel for what the first festival looked like. Other locals provided memories and information about festival themes and how those changed over the years. In many ways the core of the festival remains very much intact but some details have changed.

The "Journal" was full of pre-event stories in the weeks before the first festival. Readers were encouraged to share memories about sugarbeet farming and processing. Hewitt added "we wanted to have a king and queen of the festival and asked people to nominate candidates who had been connected to the industry." The first royalty was Roy Finley, King, and Lucille Nash, Queen. Dave Briere, who had started working at the U and I Sugar Factory as a teenager, was selected as the first Parade Marshal .

Hewitt rewrote some lyrics for the song that inspired the idea of the Sugarbeet Festival. Practice sessions to learn the Sugarbeet Crawl, a dance that went along with the new theme song, were held at the high school. A story repeated several times from locals reminiscing about the first festival involved the three 'Gilbert sisters' who came to the street dance and demonstrated the Sugarbeet Crawl.

In a letter to the newspaper nominating her brother Lewis to be Sugarbeet King, posthumously, Elsie Gilbert Nelson wrote "Lewis and I were doing the "Sugarbeet Crawl" when I was six and he was four. We both thinned behind Papa and our oldest sister, Zella." The Gilberts raised sugarbeets east of Harlem.

The Sugarbeet Festival evolved from the 2005 event

Several events that still survive after a decade plus include the sugarbeet growing and decorating contest, the Fun Run/Walk (updated to a Color Run where runners get splattered with colored powder by spectators), the Saturday parade, a car show and food vendors. Speaking of food, the first event featured a 'sugar mall' for vendors with products made with sugar. A local church sold Krispy Kreme Donuts in the sugar mall-a special treat not normally available in Chinook.

Other events seemed to fade over time and be replaced. The first festival had a display of vintage sugarbeet-related farm machinery. The Blaine County Museum created the "History of Milk River Valley's Sugarbeet Industry" with photos and memorabilia from an earlier era. The historical displays went away and the coloring contest stopped at some point.

In some ways the Sugarbeet Festival became an unofficial "town homecoming" for Chinook. School class reunions were often held in conjunction with the Festival. Families would gather because the Festival weekend always included a parade and things to entertain the kids.

Then in 2017 interest in the festival waned and no one stepped up to organize and make it happen. With no festival in 2017 there was renewed interest to keep the festival going and have one in 2018 but with "some modifications." Chuck Hewitt, the originator of the idea, said he was "very disappointed that the Festival was not held in 2017" and remained hopeful that one could be held in 2018.

With input from the community the chamber decided to organize a less ambitious Festival for 2018. For one thing, organizers recognized that locals who helped stage the various events often could not really participate in and enjoy the festival because they were always working.

Another big hurdle, each year, was to decide on a theme for the festival and then find enough appropriate ways to celebrate the theme. An eventual solution was to downsize the number of events and not have a theme. With a streamlined number of events more locals could participate in the festival. And the stress of coming up with themed-activities was removed, making it easier for groups sponsoring events to stage a fun event.

The Festival changed and new volunteers got involved. In past years the festival themes focused on a variety of the economic engines that drive the economy of the county. But the essence of the Sugarbeet Festival is still very much the same as the original-a time to have some fun and celebrate the lowly sugarbeet.