Octoberfest Hits The Spot In Post Falls Bratwurst, Strudel, Other Goodies Raise Funds For Historical Society

Town founder Frederick Post would have been proud to see the hundreds of people who turned out to sample his native country’s cuisine at an Octoberfest on Thursday.

The Post Falls Historical Society held the event, the fifth for the city, at Q’emiln Riverside Park on the Spokane River, in a new pavilion built by the Post Falls Lions Club.

By 5:30, a half-hour after the celebration began, so many people had showed up that volunteers had already made another trip for more food.

Skip Hissong, a volunteer cook, estimated they had fed even more people than last year’s record 450 to 500 people.

The Octoberfest is a fund-raiser for the Post Falls Historical Society, though board member Kim Brown said the club usually doesn’t make a large amount of money from the event.

“It’s mostly to get people out to enjoy themselves and see what we’re doing,” she said.

The smell of brats cooking filled the air as volunteers dished out the grilled bratwursts - with sauerkraut, hot potato salad and apple strudel - under the roof of the new pavilion.

In addition to food, the historical society was selling collector beer steins, calendars with photos of Post Falls and posters of historic photos.

“With this new covering, we’re kind of christening the pavilion,” Brown said of the spacious building. “We used to have to rent a tent. This is like moving uptown!”

The pavilion is 120 feet by 60 feet and was filled with green picnic tables Thursday evening. The Lions, who donated most of the labor to build it as well as money toward its cost, broke ground for construction in August. They still plan to build a handrail along the sides and install permanent lighting and a permanent stage. They also want to build a small storage unit for the building and 50 new picnic tables, Hissong said.

Once it’s done, it will be worth about $95,000, he estimated.

“It happened because of so many people in town,” Hissong said, explaining that all the credit for the pavilion’s construction shouldn’t go solely to the Lions.