Montrose has thrown a Blueberry Festival every August since 1972

A handful of Montrose residents in 1972 decided their small city at the northwest corner of Genesee County needed something to gather around, and they bet on blueberries. The bet held. Every August since, the town has filled up for the Blueberry Festival, which has run without a missed year for over half a century — a remarkable streak for an event with no corporate sponsor underwriting it.

The festival keeps faith with the simple stuff, the pleasures that don’t go out of style: a blueberry pancake breakfast, a parade down the main street, carnival rides, a flea market, craft booths, and the kind of contests — pie-eating among them — that exist mostly so the whole town can stand around and laugh. It runs on volunteers, hundreds of them in a given year, and the money it raises circles back into Montrose.

That is really the trick of it. A town this size doesn’t keep something going for fifty-plus years because the rides are world-beating; it keeps it going because the same families work the same booths their parents worked, and because a slow August weekend is exactly when a place needs a reason to be in the street together. It lands in the third week of August most years, and for that weekend a city of a few thousand acts like the center of the county.