The first Stevensville Scarecrow Festival was held on First Friday in October   Click here to see the scarecrows

Mailbox Contest

S.A.S.S. was founded with the First Annual Stevensville Rural Mailbox Art Contest in May, 2001. This contest was always a lot of fun. We would give the rural mailbox holders about a month to paint, sculpt, paper mache, mosaic, feather, and fur their mailboxes, then send out a panel of judges to check them all out.

The contest was aided greatly by the Stevensville Post Office, who publicized the contest for us and volunteered to have the rural postal carriers identify boxes to include in the contest. We took their lists and drove around to the contestants homes, usually a two-day, all-day event, to judge the boxes on use of color, aesthetics, originality, and other factors. The box that received the most points won, and we also awarded second, third and honorable mention prizes.

The first year of the contest we were accompanied by a reporter and photographer from the Missoulian newspaper, and we landed on the front page two days later! The judges recall pulling up to various mailboxes around the Stevensville area and laughing at the delightful variety of decorations the public came up with.

This event was what put S.A.S.S. on the map, but after four years of running the contest we decided to give the mailboxes a break and move on to birdhouses. Both are types of art that are easy for the public to be involved in creating, which is one of the goals of S.A.S.S. Our first birdhouse contest took place in 2005, coinciding with annual Migration Mania birding festival.