Manton's Harvest Festival, going since 1924

A town of around twelve hundred people does not usually throw a parade that pulls crowds off the highway. Manton has been doing it every Labor Day weekend since 1924. The Harvest Festival started as a small end-of-season gathering. The harvest in the name was a real harvest — the close of the growing year in a farming and logging town. Over the next hundred summers it grew into the event the whole town calendar bends around.

It runs the full holiday weekend, Friday through Monday. Most of the action centers on the old Manton railroad station on Wall Street. There is live music, a craft show, food, and family events that are mostly free to get into. Then there is the parade, the thing people drive in from all over the region to see. For a place this size, that is no small feat. It is the work of a hundred years of the same families, churches, and clubs building floats and lining the street.

That is the heart of why a festival like this lasts. It is not a tourist attraction someone invented to draw visitors. It grew up out of the town itself, one Labor Day at a time. The people who put it on now are mostly the children and grandchildren of the people who put it on before.

Come the Tuesday after, Manton goes quiet again. A wide main street, a few storefronts, the trains long gone from the station. But for four days at the tail end of every summer, the place fills right up. The parade rolls down Wall Street, and a town that has run this thing since the Coolidge years shows the rest of northern Michigan how it is done.