Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • F A L L 2 0 1 9 56 is history and lore makes it hardly surprising that there are those for whom scarecrows provoke a strong sense of unease. After all, they can be so lifelike that you still half expect them to pick themselves up off of their post and begin shuffling towards you. Or perhaps, conditioned by e Wizard of Oz, you begin to think of them as sad, kindhearted creatures that make up for their lack of brains with a kind of folksy wisdom. Maybe you want to free them from their posts yourself. e organizers of Montana's October scarecrow festivals would kindly ask you not to feed, agitate, or liberate the scarecrows. In Stanford, Montana, a sleepy little farm and ranch town in Central Montana, Tess Brady, pillar of the community and orga- nizer of the Stanford Scarecrow Festival, clearly loves her town. But even before the flowers of summer, Tess has already started planning her scarecrow. "I start thinking of what I'm going to do in about April," she says. "Plus I have to give my husband fair warning on what building and welding needs to be done for my creation!" Tess worked at the Basin State Bank for 43 years, and now she says she "just does whatever makes me happy", and a big part of that is her little scarecrow festival, which garners some 20-30 entries a year. Tess personally tags the scarecrows and helps assemble the panels of judges, not to mention working on two or three scarecrows each year. Asked if she has any favorites from past years she speaks with admirable small- town diplomacy: "as far as favorite ones, there are too many to mention. It is amazing how people come up with an idea for one." Brady got the idea for the scarecrow festival in 2007 from an article she read in Taste of Home magazine, and she thought it would be nice to "decorate Main Street for Fall and have some fun with it." Soon, scarecrows of increasing complexity and artfulness began to line Main Street. Along with a chili feed and an occasional pumpkin toss or race for the kids, the Stanford Scarecrow festival comprises a major part of the small town's Autumn social life, and much of it is owed to Tess Brady's in- volvement. As one Stanford resident told a reporter for Treasure State Lifestyles, "Stanford would be a dead town without Tess." MONTANA'S SPECIAL by JOE SHELTON T HE HISTORY OF SCARECROWS AND SCARECROW FESTIVALS GO WAY BACK. Ancient Egyptians used a variation of them to protect their crops along the Nile River Delta from pesky quails. But it was the Greeks, Romans, and Japanese who anthropomor- phized them, dressing wood and straw up in old clothes and lending them clubs and scythes to enhance their capacity to intimidate birds. In the England of the Middle Ages, where the job of scattering hungry birds was typically given to poor boys in search of a few coins, scarecrows were reinvented following the dearth of hired labor after the Black Death thinned the population by 30 to 40% and able-bodied boys were in short supply. In the Americas, many agrarian Native-American tribes employed some variation on the modern scarecrow. Friends of Owen State Park Scary Barry's Root Canal

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