Ask most people in Hiawatha what they're doing the last weekend of September and you'll get the same answer: the Maple Leaf Festival, out on the Brown County Courthouse Square, weather permitting a walk past a few hundred parked hot rods before lunch. Ask what happens five weeks later and you'll hear about the Halloween parade, the one people here will tell you, correctly, is the oldest in the country. Both are treated as wholesome civic inheritance, the kind of thing a small Kansas town just does every year because it always has.
What gets left out of that telling is why either tradition exists in the first place. The Halloween parade was not dreamed up to delight children. It was a woman's attempt to stop her garden from getting destroyed. And the town's most visited attraction, a marble monument that still draws people off Highway 36, was built by a man specifically because his neighbors told him not to. Hiawatha's two most enduring rituals were not gifts to the community. They were responses to it, and in both cases the town ended up living inside the response for a century.
A garden, some vandals, and the oldest Halloween parade in America
The story locals tell about Elizabeth Krebs usually skips the part that actually explains the parade. In 1913, Krebs surveyed her Hiawatha garden after Halloween and found it wrecked by pranksters. Rather than call for stricter punishment, she proposed the opposite: give the town's kids something to do that wasn't destruction. In 1914 she organized what became known as the Halloween Frolic, redirecting a night of mischief into an organized celebration.
That idea did not stay local. It spread to other towns as a template for community Halloween events, and Hiawatha's version kept running long enough to be recognized as the nation's oldest Halloween parade. Krebs is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery, and to this day the parade is led by a truck carrying flowers and a sign honoring her as its founder, a small piece of civic memory that most attendees walk right past without noticing.
The parade itself is not framed as a grudge anymore. It reads today as pure small-town tradition, the kind Hiawatha's Chamber and Visitors Bureau lists alongside the Holiday Homes Tour as one of the events that defines the calendar year. But the origin matters if you actually live here, because it tells you something true about how this town builds its rituals: not by committee, but by someone getting fed up and doing something about it in public.
The memorial built to spite the neighbors
The Davis Memorial works the same way, just louder and stranger. John Milburn Davis arrived in Brown County as an orphan in the late 1870s, worked as a farmhand for the Hart family, and married their daughter Sarah against her family's wishes. The couple farmed 260 acres north of Hiawatha, moved into town in 1915, and lived by all accounts a quiet, frugal, childless life.
When Sarah died in 1930, John Davis did something nobody expected. He tore out the simple "Davis" headstone marking her grave in Mount Hope Cemetery and began building a memorial that would eventually include eleven life-sized marble and granite statues, carved in Italy from photographs he supplied, set beneath a granite canopy weighing roughly 50 tons. The project cost an estimated $200,000, an almost unthinkable sum for a small-town widower to spend in the middle of the Great Depression.
Hiawatha did not respond with sympathy. The town had no hospital and no swimming pool at the time, and community leaders pressed Davis to put his money toward those projects instead. He refused, and kept refusing, even as the criticism mounted. When Pulitzer-winning journalist Ernie Pyle interviewed him in the late 1930s, Davis made his position plain.
"They hate me. But it's my money and I spent it the way I pleased."
He died penniless at the Brown County poor farm in 1947, and his friends paid for his funeral. The memorial he left behind was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and now draws visitors from across the country, generating exactly the kind of tourism revenue Davis never lived to see and never intended to provide.
Here is the shape of both stories laid side by side.
| Tradition | Started as | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Elizabeth Krebs's Halloween Frolic (1914) | A response to a vandalized garden | Recognized as the nation's oldest Halloween parade |
| The Davis Memorial (1930 to 1934) | A retort to neighbors who wanted his money spent on the town instead | National Register site and one of the region's most visited attractions |
Two of Hiawatha's defining public rituals came from people at odds with their neighbors, not from anyone trying to build a legacy for the town's sake. The legacy happened anyway, as an accident of stubbornness.
The friendlier bookend
Not everything on the fall calendar carries a grudge behind it. The Maple Leaf Festival, set for Saturday, September 26 this year around the Brown County Courthouse Square, is closer to what people expect from a small-town festival: vendors, food trucks, live music, and a car show that in recent years has handed out trophies across categories like Best of Show, Best Hot Rod, and Best Tractor. Recent lineups have included touring acts like the band True North alongside local performers, plus kid-focused entertainment that keeps the square full into the afternoon. It is the version of civic pride that gets built on purpose, arriving about five weeks ahead of the Halloween parade that closes out the season.
That gap is short enough that a resident can treat the whole stretch as one continuous season rather than two separate events.
What a Saturday in that stretch actually looks like
- Start at the square during the Maple Leaf Festival, working through the car show rows before the afternoon heat sets in.
- Walk Oregon Street for lunch. The Hiawatha Creamery and New China Restaurant sit within a block of each other, and Hiawatha's First Street Bar and Grill is a short drive over if you want something heavier.
- Spend an hour at the Brown County Ag Museum and Windmill Lane, where more than 40 windmills, some standing 65 feet tall, are arranged as a kind of open-air memorial to the farm families that donated them.
- If the afternoon light is right, drive out to Mount Hope Cemetery to see the Davis Memorial in person. Photographs do not prepare most visitors for the scale of it, an awning of stone over eleven marble figures in a town of a few thousand people.
- Close the day at The Country Cabin, a few miles northwest of town, or back at First Street Bar and Grill if you'd rather stay in town.
None of that requires planning around a single ticketed event. It is the ordinary geography of a fall weekend here, built from things that have been standing for decades.
The through-line for someone who already lives here
The compression is what makes it worth noticing. In the space of six weeks, Hiawatha residents pass through a festival built on civic goodwill, a monument built on spite, and a parade built on frustration, and all three now function as the same thing: proof that this is a town that turns friction into something it keeps. That is not a marketing line. It is closer to a pattern, one Elizabeth Krebs and John Davis established without ever meeting each other's intentions, and one the Maple Leaf Festival simply doesn't need in order to work.
If you already own a home near the square or out toward the Ag Museum, that pattern is part of what you're selling when the time eventually comes, whether that's this year or in ten. Buyers who ask about Brown County are usually asking what daily life feels like here, and the honest answer includes a Halloween parade older than the interstate highway system and a marble monument nobody asked for but everyone visits. You can read more about what that kind of daily life connects to on our Brown County neighborhood page.
When you're ready to talk about your own place in that story, whether you're weighing a move, an acreage purchase, or just curious what your home is worth in today's market, Gateway Real Estate & Auction is a phone call away. Start with our Get Your Instant Home Valuation tool and see where you stand.
