The Beaver Queen Pageant Turns Twenty

Who will take home the crown in Durham’s 20th annual Beaver Queen pageant?

It’s the kind of question that only a place like Durham would dare to ask and answer.

This year’s Beaver Queen hopefuls—a roster that includes Norma Pat, Chic Ada, Woody Wonka, Clint Eatswood, and Kenny Logends—are humans in what can only be described as beaver drag. The pageant is expected to rake in around $30,000 for local conservation group Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association. 

And if past INDY coverage is any indication, the pageant is going to be a dam good time.

In 2022, Ana Young, writing for The 9th Street Journal, described the scene as “one large village party featuring parades, dancing, environmental activism, and an actual pageant.” Young also dove into the pageant’s history, which is probably the only competition in the Triangle that encourages bribes for its panel of judges.

The first pageant was held in 2004. In the early 2000s, residents of Duke Park were worried as the state planned to widen I-85, and were planning to trap beavers to mitigate the flooding caused by the dams of nature’s finest engineers. They lobbied the county to help save the beavers and threw a pageant the next year to celebrate.

In its second year, the pageant became a fundraiser when the father of a teenage contestant offered the judges $1 to vote for his daughter. (That former teenager, Jillian Anderson, is now a grown-up organizer of the pageant.)

“I did not win that year,” Anderson tells the INDY in an interview. But she did come back to win in 2018 as the beaver Genie Tailyah, and hopes to coach her husband, a contestant under the name Woody Wonka, to Beaver Queen Stardom this year. 

In 2005, Marty Jarrell published an INDY dispatch from the first official pageant, sampling some of the contestant’s talents and punny names:

“Latta Tail’s impressive demonstration of walking down stairs on high heels without falling is overshadowed by Beverly Woody’s ability to actually clog while wearing stilettos and crinolines. Besa La Beaver, a sort of Spanish Marilyn Monroe, lip-syncs while shaking her beaver tail seductively. And Butchie Beaver regales the crowd with a kung-fu fighting performance.”

At the time, Jarrell noted that the pageant was special because of its deep neighborhood roots. And it seems that even in 2024, the pageant hasn’t yet sold out to any corporate overlords or lost its eccentric feel.

“It’s like a big backyard party for a family or something. But the backyard is this meadow in Duke Park and the family is several hundreds of people,” says Greg Palmer, an organizer, in an interview with INDY this year. “The pageant is fiercely and fabulously grounded in the community.”

The 20th annual Beaver Queen Pageant is this Saturday, June 1, at 4 p.m. in Duke Park. Voting is open online.

Reach Reporter Chase Pellegrini de Paur at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].