Twenty years ago this month, Sarah Calhoun opened the doors of a small storefront on Main Street in White Sulphur Springs and started selling work pants built for women. The store’s grand opening was Oct. 8, 2006, at 206 E. Main St., with what the Billings Gazette called a quaint little grand opening.
The idea sounded unlikely at the time: a national apparel brand run out of a ranching town in Meagher County with fewer than a thousand residents. Two decades later, Red Ants Pants is still on Main Street, and the business has grown into something that reaches well past clothing.
From Connecticut to Meagher County
Calhoun grew up on a farm in rural Connecticut. Her pull toward Montana came in part from a book, Ivan Doig’s memoir This House of Sky, which tells of his childhood in the sheep country around White Sulphur Springs. She did not think of herself as a feminist when she started the company, she told the Billings Gazette this month. She was a farm girl filling a need: there were no work pants built to fit women well.
The name comes from the insects. “In an ant colony, it’s the females that do all the work,” Calhoun told the Gazette.
Red Ants Pants set out to fix that, with sturdy canvas and denim pants cut for women’s bodies and sold in a wide range of waist and inseam sizes. The company has kept its manufacturing in the United States. In the early days, before the business had much of a footprint, Calhoun traveled the state selling pants out of the back of an Airstream trailer.
A festival in a cow pasture
In 2011, the company started the Red Ants Pants Music Festival, held each July on a cow pasture outside town. The festival leans toward country, folk and Americana acts and has grown into one of the larger summer events in central Montana. This year’s edition, the 15th, ran July 23 to 26, 2026.
The festival brings thousands of visitors to a town that normally sees far fewer, filling local campgrounds, cafes and motels for a long weekend. In 2018, it was named Event of the Year.
Money back to rural towns
The same year the festival began, Calhoun launched the Red Ants Pants Foundation. Its focus is rural Montana: supporting women’s leadership, working family farms and ranches, and small communities. The foundation has given more than $210,000 to projects in about 100 rural communities, and it awarded 20 grants in 2026.
The foundation also runs a Girls Leadership Program, now in its eighth year, which takes girls from rural areas through hands-on workshops in practical skills and confidence-building. This year’s Eastern Montana retreat was held May 8 to 10 in Miles City.
Calhoun put it simply in an interview with the Billings Gazette: “It’s such an essential thing to support our gender.”
A customer since the Airstream days
Carah Ronan, who runs Rodi Farm, a flower farm south of Laurel, with her husband, Zach Didier, bought her first pair of Red Ants Pants in 2008. She told the Gazette she now has 17 years of them in her closet. She prefers the curvy fit; he wears the straight cut.
Ronan went to a Red Ants Pants women in agriculture retreat in the winter of 2024 and came away with friends she still calls for advice. “I think in rural communities in general, sometimes it’s hard to find that safe place or that person that you get along with,” she said.
She also credits Calhoun with helping bring White Sulphur Springs back. “It used to be all closed up and nothing was really much open,” Ronan said. “And now you go up there and there’s all these great places to eat and all these great shops coming back in and a brewery and all these cool things happening, and a lot of that I think stems from Sarah creating the festival there.”
Recognition along the way
Calhoun’s work has collected a long list of honors. In 2011, she was named Montana’s Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2012, the U.S. Small Business Administration recognized her as its National Women in Business Champion. She was inducted into the Montana Business Hall of Fame in 2018.
Those awards point to a pattern that runs through the company’s story. The business has stayed small in headcount and rooted in one town, while its reach, through mail orders, the festival and the foundation, extends across the state and beyond.
Still on Main Street
The old saddle shop on Main Street remains the company’s storefront. Customers can try on pants there or order online.
For White Sulphur Springs, a ranching town that has watched many rural businesses close over the decades, the anniversary is a reminder that a company with national customers can be built from a place most of the country has never heard of. Calhoun told the Gazette that what makes her proudest is hearing from customers, like the woman who wore her pants into surgery because they made her feel strong. That, she said, is the point: “Seeing women achieving, building, doing great things in the world, wearing our pants.”
More about the store, the festival and the foundation’s grant programs is available at redantspants.com.