Ely's calendar looks quiet for most of the year and then, sometime around Labor Day, it isn't. Over five weeks this year, the town packs in a theater milestone, a family music festival at a lake camp, four days of storefront deals downtown, a craft show that fills the town's biggest park, and a nighttime run lit up with colored powder. If you only pay attention to whichever event shows up loudest on Facebook, you'll catch the festival and miss the story.
The story is on Sheridan Street, and it doesn't come with a crowd estimate attached.
Five Weeks, Five Reasons to Check the Calendar
Here's what's actually on the books between now and the end of September, in the order it happens:
| Date | Event | Where | Worth Knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 21 | Ely's Historic State Theater 90th Birthday Celebration | 238 E Sheridan St | A single afternoon, and there's no dress rehearsal for turning 90 twice |
| Sept 4 | Fest du Nord Family Music Festival | YMCA Camp du Nord | A regional folk and Americana lineup on the camp's grounds, not downtown |
| Sept 10-13 | Harvest Days | Downtown storefronts | Four days of business specials timed to run ahead of the festival crowd |
| Sept 11-13 | Harvest Moon Festival, 32nd annual | Whiteside Park | The festival's own listing puts recent attendance at 17,000 over three days |
| Sept 25 | NLC 5K Color Glow Run | 760 Miners Drive East | An evening run that draws a completely different crowd than any of the above |
Laid out that way, the pattern is obvious. One of these things is not like the others. Four of the five events are built to draw a crowd and measure themselves by how big that crowd gets. The fifth is a theater marking nine decades of barely surviving long enough to have a birthday at all, and nobody's counting heads at the door.
A Marquee That Has Survived Worse Than a Quiet Birthday
The building at 238 E Sheridan Street opened in October 1936 as the State Theater, built the year before by Liebenberg and Kaplan, the architecture firm that designed movie houses across the Upper Midwest during the golden age of the format. Before the marquee went up, the project had been planned under a different name entirely: the Rio. Ely got the State instead, with a 36-foot neon sign and a 630-seat auditorium wired for RCA sound. The first film to play there was called My American Wife.
That's the kind of detail that sounds like trivia until you sit with how close the building came to disappearing. Television and home video did what they did to small-town theaters everywhere, and by the 1980s Ely's version needed a local movie enthusiast named Ron Forsman to keep the lights on. He managed it for a while. The theater closed anyway in 2008, a casualty of the Great Recession, and sat dark on Sheridan Street for six years.
What happened next is the part locals tend to skip past because it feels recent, but it's the reason there's a 90th birthday to celebrate at all. The Ott family bought the building in 2014 with a plan to restore it. The National Register of Historic Places added it to the list in July 2015. A nonprofit formed in early 2020 to run the place going forward, and after a pandemic delay, the theater's first film screening in over a decade was Ferris Bueller's Day Off, on June 24, 2020. It now runs two screens, hosts the annual Ely Film Festival, and has its own birthday marked on the calendar for August 21 at 1 p.m.
No attendance projection. No vendor count. Just a building that's been the Rio, the State, an empty storefront, a restoration project, and now a working nonprofit cinema, in that order, over ninety years.
The Festival That Will Actually Fill Whiteside Park
None of this is a knock on Harvest Moon. The festival earns its size honestly. Now in its 32nd year, it takes over Whiteside Park September 11 through 13 with roughly 125 juried artists and crafters and a food court that's become as much a draw as the booths themselves. The current festival listing puts recent turnout at 17,000 people across the three days, a number that's climbed noticeably from the roughly 10,000 reported in earlier seasons, and local coverage from the last couple of years has tracked a steady run of new vendors joining each fall. It's the kind of event that outgrows its own history by a little bit every year.
Running right alongside it is Harvest Days, a four-day stretch from September 10 through 13 when downtown Ely businesses put out their own specials and fall promotions, timed to catch festival visitors before or after their trip to the park. If you've ever wondered why some storefronts start their fall sales a day early, that's why. The Thursday start gives shoppers a run at the deals before Friday's festival crowd fills the sidewalks between downtown and Whiteside Park.
Between the two, that one weekend does more retail and foot traffic for Ely than almost anything else on the calendar. It's also the weekend that requires the least explanation. Everyone already knows Harvest Moon is coming. Fewer people are marking August 21 on anything.
The Weekends on Either Side
The stretch isn't only bookended by a theater anniversary and a craft fair. On September 4, a week before Harvest Moon gets going, Fest du Nord sets up at YMCA Camp du Nord, the camp property on the lake that most Ely residents know as a summer-camp fixture rather than a concert venue. This year's family music festival lineup leans into regional folk and Americana, with acts including Jack Klatt and The Roe Family Singers among the names on the bill. It's a different audience entirely from the craft-fair crowd, and a different setting, out at the camp instead of downtown.
Then, after Harvest Moon wraps and the vendor booths come down, the calendar closes out on September 25 with the NLC 5K Color Glow Run at 760 Miners Drive East, an evening run built around colored powder rather than pottery or pie. It's the kind of event that draws families and runners rather than festival browsers, and it lands far enough after Harvest Moon that it reads as its own occasion rather than an afterthought.
Add it up and Ely's late summer isn't one big weekend with some noise around the edges. It's five distinct gatherings, each pulling from a different slice of the town: artists and craft shoppers at Whiteside Park, families and folk fans out at the camp, downtown shopkeepers running their own promotion, runners doing a night race in September, and, quietly, a nonprofit theater marking the ninth decade of a building that spent six of those years dark and empty.
Which One Actually Matters to You
If you're the kind of person who plans a fall weekend around a festival, Harvest Moon and its 17,000 fellow attendees will still be there next September, and the September after that. The theater's 90th won't repeat. There's no scheduled encore for a building hitting a milestone that took surviving a closure, a six-year vacancy, and a full restoration to reach. Stopping by 238 E Sheridan Street on August 21, even for a few minutes between errands, is the one item on this list that won't come around again in quite the same way.
That's the part worth knowing before Labor Day scrambles the calendar. The loudest event isn't always the one worth showing up for. Sometimes it's the quiet one, on the same street, that's been waiting ninety years for someone to notice.
For more on what makes this stretch of Lake Vermilion country worth paying attention to year-round, our Ely neighborhood guide is a good place to keep exploring. And if a fall visit to Ely has you thinking further ahead than a festival weekend, The Snyder Team at Vermilion Real Estate Services is here to help. Make your cabin dream a reality: schedule a showing.
