Community revives civic celebration

Nespelem, a town of 210 in the heart of the Colville Indian Reservation, will reinvent a long-dormant community celebration this weekend.

The Father’s Day weekend event, called Mill Pond Days, will be similar to May Day events that ended in the early 1950s.

The festival name comes from a fondly remembered mill pond that floated children as well as logs. Mill Pond Days will feature a parade, a basketball tournament, a fun run, food vendors, a street dance and a historical exhibit that examines the town’s sawmill roots.

“I think people have just missed having a civic kind of celebration,” said Tim Schell, a member of the committee that’s making it happen. “It’s been a very positive thing for the community. People are talking ‘town,’ and it’s pretty great.”

It’s been so long since Nespelem has had a parade that Val Vargas, committee secretary and parade director, has to take tribal elders’ word for it that there was a May Day parade “back in the day.” Now is a good time for another parade in view of the fact that this year is the 70th anniversary of the town’s incorporation, Vargas said.

The old celebration faded along with the town’s high school, which provided a lot of parade entries before it closed in 1955.

Saturday’s parade, at noon, will have three dozen entries from Nespelem and other communities around the reservation. There will be a student band, horses, kids on scooters and golf carts, dressed-up dogs, floats from a half-dozen businesses and lots of grand marshals.

Every age group will have its own grand marshals. Yvonne Moses and John Grant will represent tribal elders, community activists Denny Jackson and Nancy Armstrong-Montes will represent younger adults, and the Nespelem School’s undefeated girls basketball team – all 16 players – owns the youth category.

Local veterans will accompany a color guard from the Spokane-based Fort Spokane Battalion of the U.S. Naval Sea Cadets.

Already, the parade is raising community awareness. Schell said a map of the parade route prompted some people to exclaim, “We have street names?”

Directions in tiny Nespelem typically are given by pointing or saying “over by whatchamacallits,” Schell said. “In a small town, you can get away with that.”

Schell, a former teacher, is the festival committee’s historian. He has assembled a historical exhibit that will be presented in the Town Hall, a small wood-frame structure built in 1937.

The exhibit will feature artifacts dating from the formation of the reservation in 1872, and “a wonderful collection of photographs from 1891 to the early 1950s,” Schell said.

Part of the history to be covered is the fact that Nespelem, at the foot of a bluff, was a gathering place long before it was a town. It also had two mills before it had a mayor.

A water-powered grist and log mill was built in 1895 by the federal government. It was succeeded in the early 1930s by the privately owned Whyatt-Duncan sawmill, which created a log pond with a diversion dam on the Nespelem River.

“Not only did it float logs, but it floated every kid from the first day it was warm enough until the last day it was warm enough,” Schell said.

Both mills are long gone, and the Whyatt-Duncan mill pond is now just a wetland. But memories of the mill pond survived, and the term is now associated with a smaller pond in the same area, created for an irrigation system.

Events will begin at noon Friday with a 3-on-3 basketball tournament and end with a street dance from 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.

The festival will resume at 8 a.m. Saturday with a 5-kilometer fun run in which everyone gets a T-shirt with a drawing of the old mill pond by local artist Virgil “Smoker” Marchand. The basketball tournament will continue from 9 a.m. until the celebration ends about 8 or 9 p.m.