"It's not just a triathlon, it's an experience," one race sponsor said about the CiderMan Sprint Triathlon at Buttercup Ranch & Creamery. That sentence undersells what actually happens at the farm this weekend. Tomorrow morning, September 12, at 7 a.m., athletes will wade into the farm's two acre lake on Douglas Road for the open water swim, and every entry fee they paid will already be split before the starting horn sounds. Ten percent goes to the Millstadt Fire Department. Ten percent goes to Millstadt Police.
Today happens to be September 11, the twenty fifth anniversary of the attacks the race was built to remember. Buttercup Ranch has said it's planning extra activities for the milestone year, on top of what's already the sixth running of an event that started with twenty racers and drew a hundred in 2025.
Why a Farm Triathlon Is a Memorial
The CiderMan wasn't named for the cider press, or not only for that. Rich MacKeen, who runs Buttercup Ranch with his wife Mary, served in the Air Force alongside Jim Ogonowski, brother of John Ogonowski, the captain of Flight 11. The race happens every year on the weekend closest to September 11 specifically to honor that connection, which is why Buttercup Ranch calls it Patriots' Weekend rather than just race weekend.
That memorial framing explains a design choice that would otherwise look strange for a farm event: the fire and police donation isn't a token gesture tacked onto a ticket price. It's the reason the race exists in the current form. When the MacKeens decided to build a triathlon on their own land, they built the beneficiary into the plan first and the swim course second.
What Five Years of Growth Actually Bought
The jump from twenty participants to a hundred matters for reasons beyond bragging rights. A hundred entries at current pricing generates a meaningfully larger donation pool than twenty did, which means the fire and police departments are seeing real growth in what a Saturday morning race brings in, not just a bigger crowd on the lake. The race earned USA Triathlon sanctioning for the second year running in 2026, a status that typically brings more serious out of town competitors and, by extension, more entry fees flowing back into the same two accounts.
The triathlon itself runs a 500 meter open water swim, a 20 kilometer bike loop through the roads outside town, and a 5 kilometer run, with shorter options like the aquabike and duathlon for people who don't want the full distance. Last year's race drew sponsors like Bike Surgeon, Freeburg Total Fitness, and Marlou Eckert, alongside a long list of other regional businesses that donate prizes for the post race drawing. None of that sponsorship money touches the fire and police split. It's a separate layer of local support stacked on top of the entry fees.
The Weekend Around the Race
The race itself wraps by mid morning, but the Patriots' Weekend Extravaganza runs both days from 2 to 9 p.m. Last year's edition brought Street Corner Serenade for rock, pop, and oldies, followed by Scott Vignassi's Big Little Big Band playing Count Basie style swing, with lead singer Steve Shininger doing a passable Sinatra. Roy-el Catering handled the food, brisket and beef sandwiches with cheese fries. The farm's first ever balloon glow lit up seven hot air balloons that Saturday night after a Friday postponement due to wind, a detail worth knowing if you're planning around the forecast this weekend too, since the balloon glow is explicitly weather dependent and can shift a day.
This year adds what Buttercup Ranch is calling Patriots Village, plus carriage rides and a petting zoo layered onto the returning triathlon, food trucks, and live music. Camping is available on site for anyone who wants to turn the weekend into an overnight stay rather than a day trip, and the farm has said it's adding enough new elements in 2026 to justify calling the whole thing an Extravaganza rather than just a weekend.
If the race and the balloon glow leave a gap for lunch, that gap tends to get filled back in town. Which is where Millstadt's other September fundraiser starts to look less like a coincidence and more like a habit.
A Tavern That Runs on the Same Logic
Ott's Tavern & Millstadt Fish Stand at 20 E. Washington Street isn't part of any fundraiser, but it survives on the same currency the triathlon does: people showing up because it's theirs. The tavern closed for a stretch after longtime owner Deedee Speichinger shut its doors, until Terry Davinroy bought the building and brought back the original recipes with Speichinger's family's help, including Issy's coleslaw, a recipe that Davinroy has said outsells the alternative by roughly ten to one. The fish stand still runs cash only, with an ATM on site, and still serves its weekly fry on Friday and Saturday nights, jumbo breaded shrimp added to the Saturday menu. Yelp's estimated health score for the business currently sits at 100 out of 100, and Tripadvisor currently ranks it the top rated restaurant in town.
None of that has anything to do with donation percentages. But it's the same mechanism in a different shape. A family took over a closing business because the town wanted it to stay open, the way the fire and police departments get funded because families sign up for a triathlon they could just as easily skip.
Two Weeks Later, the Same Idea Shows Up at Second Base
On September 26, that pattern repeats at a softball diamond instead of a lake. Millstadt Fire will face off against Millstadt Police in a Red vs. Blue softball game that the village's community news page has been promoting for weeks. Gates open at 11 a.m. with activities before the noon first pitch. Twenty five percent of proceeds go to whichever team wins, directed to that team's chosen charity, and the remainder supports Millstadt EMS directly.
That same evening, Eckert's Millstadt Farm opens its Haunted Hayride for the season, running Friday and Saturday nights through the fall. The hayride isn't a fundraiser and doesn't pretend to be one, but its timing means Millstadt's calendar has now produced two separate donation mechanisms, run by two completely different organizers, both landing money on the same three agency safety net within a single month. Buttercup Ranch is a private farm with no obligation to fund anything beyond its own gate fees. The fire and police departments built their own softball rivalry into a public event for the same reason. Nobody coordinated these two things centrally. They just both happened to land on the idea that a Saturday can double as a budget line.
What This Actually Tells You About Living Here
It would be easy to read Millstadt's September as a string of unrelated fun things to do, a triathlon here, a softball game there, a hayride to close it out. But the fire, police, and EMS thread running underneath those three events is the more useful thing to notice if you already call this town home. The people who show up to swim in a farm lake or watch a police officer strike out in front of a beer garden crowd are, without much ceremony, deciding how well funded their own emergency services are going to be this year. That's a different kind of small town than the postcard version. It's one where the safety net gets built one entry fee and one ticket at a time, by people who live close enough to the fire station to know exactly who's driving the truck.
If you're weighing what day to day life actually feels like in a place like Millstadt, that's a better data point than a walkability score. Dream Team, led by Delores Doussard, works this stretch of the Metro East full time and can talk through what neighborhoods like this one actually offer beyond the event calendar. Schedule a free consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
