The pies start appearing the day before. By the time the doors of the Story Woman's Clubhouse swing open at 11 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 4, roughly fifty of them will be lined up in rows — pumpkin and pecan, apple and cherry, cream and meringue, varieties enough that regulars have learned to arrive early and pace themselves. Alongside them will be turkey with traditional trimmings, all of it cooked and carved by club members who have been planning the meal for weeks.
This is the 51st Annual Turkey Dinner, and in a town of just over 900 people tucked against the Bighorn Mountains, it is less a fundraiser than a fixture of the calendar. The club expects to serve between 300 and 500 meals to guests driving in from Story, Banner, Sheridan, Buffalo and the surrounding valleys. Adults pay $20, children ages 6 through 10 pay $10, and kids five and younger eat free. Those who can't stay can call 307-217-1903 by 6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, and members will pack a takeout dinner for them.
The money matters. Proceeds cover the clubhouse's annual operating and maintenance costs, which run roughly $12,000 to $15,000 a year — a figure that, as club members Joan Griffin and Sue Shrum explained on Sheridan Media's Public Pulse, makes this single afternoon the club's primary source of support. The club's seventy-five members raise about $18,000 annually to keep the building going, and that doesn't count capital projects like the recent replacement of rotten logs and new chinking on the structure itself.
That building is the reason the dinner exists. The Story Woman's Club was founded in 1919, and in 1930 the men of Story put up a log clubhouse on donated land. Nearly a century later it still functions as the town's de facto community center. The Woman's Club meets there on the first Thursday of the month, the Garden Club on the second Thursday, and the Lions Club — established in Story in 1957 — gathers there as well. On Mondays the doors are open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. for cultural arts. On Tuesdays, volunteers serve the Senior Lunch. The Sheridan County flu clinic sets up there each October, and the building hosts elections, civic meetings, and a Halloween haunted house for Story School students. Residents and organizations can rent it for family dinners, birthday parties, wedding receptions, and library staff dinners.
Perhaps the most telling of the club's services is one that generates no revenue at all: members provide a dinner to any bereaved family in the community, with no requirement that the family be club members or even residents of Story. The same instinct — that a shared meal is a form of care — runs through the turkey dinner itself.
The tradition dates to 1975, when the club first opened its doors for a community Thanksgiving-style meal. The scale has stayed remarkably steady: a few hundred neighbors and strangers, a table of pies, and a line that forms before the doors open.
Story itself has a habit of holding onto things. The community began in the late 1800s, when a horse trader named Marshall Wolf looked to settle in this serene spot. He originally hoped to name the town after himself, but when "Wolf" was already spoken for, he chose to name it after a nearby rancher and friend — Charles B. Story — who helped get the town's first post office off the ground.
That continuity shows up in the town's other traditions, too. Story Days, the summer celebration, has been running for more than half a century. The club's own members donate turkeys to the Story Food Bank for Thanksgiving dinners, and each December they hold a Christmas party that is the one event they don't work themselves — instead choosing a local charity to support, as they did in 2020 when Story School students received books as gifts.
But the turkey dinner remains the anchor. It is the one day each year when the clubhouse's narrow kitchen and long tables fill with people from across northern Wyoming, when the smell of roasting turkey drifts through the pines, and when a $20 plate of food quietly pays for another year of a log building that belongs to everyone. The club's own summary of its purpose is short: "We are here for the community." On the first Sunday in October, that means pie.