East Helena Memorial Day parade honors fallen service members

A cannon cracked outside East Helena’s VFW Cory-Dullum Post 10010, and the procession that followed carried veterans, Scouts and family members down Main Street to the Servicemembers Monument in Main Street Park.

The Memorial Day observance was built around the people who died in service, not around a holiday crowd. As the parade wound through town, organizers read aloud the names of service members lost over the past year, giving the ceremony a direct local ledger of sacrifice. In East Helena, the East Helena VFW, Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, Scout Troop 212 and other marchers helped keep that remembrance visible on the street.

The ritual has a fixed route and a fixed public meaning. East Helena’s parade has begun at the VFW Cory-Dullum Post 10010, 117 W. Main St., and ended at the monument in Main Street Park, a path the City of East Helena publicly posted in 2022 and later coverage repeated. In 2024, the parade ended with a 21-gun salute and Taps after guest speaker Maj. Gen. Pete Hronek, Montana’s adjutant general, addressed the crowd. In 2025, bagpipes played Amazing Grace through East Helena’s Memorial Park as the observance closed.

Those repeated stops matter in Lewis and Clark County because they carry military history forward in public, visible places. The same streets that draw the parade also connect younger residents to the institutions that guard the memory, from the East Helena VFW to Scout Troop 212 and the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution. The ceremony gives those groups a yearly role in teaching what Memorial Day means in a town where service is remembered face to face.

East Helena’s observance also sits inside a broader county pattern. In Helena, the Lewis & Clark County Veterans Memorial in Memorial Park, dedicated Aug. 15, 1949, has long served as another site for Memorial Day ceremony, showing how remembrance is spread across multiple places rather than concentrated in one downtown gathering. That network of rituals, from East Helena’s Main Street route to Memorial Park in Helena, keeps the county’s military history anchored in names, monuments and repeated public acts of respect.