Bridger Marks was getting ready for a quiet Saturday when his grandmother called. She'd found bolo ties. He made it to Clancy's Community Center in what his grandmother, Kathi Marks, guesses was under ten minutes flat.
Inside, the building was doing something it hadn't done in years: holding a crowd. Twenty-odd craft booths lined an open grey and white gym floor, tables and chairs set up near a concession stand so people could sit with hot chocolate and brownies after they'd shopped. Diane and Jill Tode, the mother-daughter team behind the sale, had pulled together a stretch of vendors selling silver jewelry, hand-painted Christmas ornaments, and freeze-dried candy and fruit. A couple dozen people moved between the tables at any given moment. Bridger walked out with a new bolo tie, his grandmother's Christmas gift to him, and a look he described as hopeful about what the market could mean for the town.
This was the inaugural Clancy Craft Sale, held in December 2025, in a room that until recently existed mostly as storage.
Kyrie Russ, a longtime Clancy resident, put the stakes plainly at the sale: "When I was a kid, we had the store and we had the Legal Tender." Now, she said, "we don't have a lot of that." In a town this size, one working room changes what a Saturday can look like.
A Gym That Sat Idle
The building started as the gym at Clancy Elementary. At some point it stopped being used for anything but holding things, a storage room bolted onto a school that kept operating without it. It might have stayed that way indefinitely if a group of committed locals hadn't decided otherwise. Over nearly four years, that group raised more than $100,000 to remake the space, including $1,200 collected at the 2024 Clancy Days event. The Community Center returned to public use at Clancy Days in June 2025, the first time in years the building was open for something other than storing school equipment.
Getting the doors open again was one project. Finishing the room was another, and that second project is still running.
The First Real Test
The December craft sale was the first time the reopened building had to actually hold a crowd on a normal weekend, no parade, no fire trucks, just neighbors showing up because there was somewhere to go. Roughly 200 people came through. A one-dollar admission at the door raised $256 for Jefferson County fire departments. Around 20 vendors set up, and Tode said she's hoping to grow that closer to 30 next year if it comes back, which she felt strongly it should.
Karrie Grover, a Boulder resident who sold freeze-dried huckleberries and Charleston Chews at a booth she ran with her sons Jonah and Nai, said the event helped her find new customers while she compared notes with other vendors on where to sell next. Not everyone in the room came to shop or sell. Some came for what Jill Tode called the point of the whole thing: a low-key reason to see people you know.
"The community's ready for opportunities to gather that are not so curated," Tode said. "It's a stop by, have a cup of coffee, visit with the people that you know, and this is a way for that to happen."
The building had some rough edges that day. The WiFi didn't cooperate. Cold water dripped on people near the entrance. None of that stopped Tode from calling the first sale a success, and none of it stopped her from floating a second one, a spring market, pending how vendors respond to a survey she's sending out.
The Room Still Isn't Done
What the December sale proved is that people will use the space once it's open. What Clancy Days 2026 showed is that opening it was only the first phase.
At this year's Clancy Days, held June 13, organizers set up a dedicated stop in the schedule where visitors could tour the Community Center and see display boards laying out the proposed final look for the building along with a breakdown of remaining expenses. Donations were being collected on the spot. That follow-through tracks with a $10,000 matching grant the center received in October 2025 from the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation, earmarked specifically for future improvements rather than the original renovation. The gym is open and getting used. It is not finished, and the people who built it back are still asking the town to help pay for the rest.
Why One Room Carries This Much Weight Here
Clancy is unincorporated, with a population of 1,851 as of the 2020 census, and it runs on two restaurants total. Most groceries, most dining, most anything beyond the basics means the roughly ten-mile drive up I-15 into Helena or over to Montana City. That's the everyday version of Clancy: small, spread out, short on places where you'd just happen to run into someone.
Then Clancy Days happens, and the math flips. Organizer Carly Delsigne and Clancy Volunteer Fire Department assistant chief Michael McCarthy have described a town of roughly 1,800 residents pulling in around 5,000 visitors for one Saturday in June, a scale the town doesn't see any other day of the year. That single-day surge is exactly why a working Community Center matters more here than it would somewhere bigger. Clancy doesn't need a room that can handle 5,000 people. It needs one that can hold 200 on a random Saturday in December, which is precisely what it did.
Bridger Marks, a sixth-generation Clancy resident, put out his first single, "Look Like the Stars," on streaming platforms not long before the craft sale. Standing in the gym that day with his grandmother, holding his new bolo tie, he talked about events like this acting as a launching pad, a place where something small in town gets a little bit of room to grow. That's a fair way to describe the building itself right now: not finished, still being paid for one grant and one door-dollar at a time, but already doing the one job a town this size actually needed it to do.
If Tode's spring market comes together, it'll likely show up on the same community channels that carried word of the December sale. Keep an eye on the Community Center's calendar either way. That building has more left to prove.
Cameron Hahn keeps a close watch on what's actually happening around Clancy, block by block, well before it shows up anywhere else. If you'd rather hear about the next market date than stumble on it after the fact, that's worth following.
