After years of tipped-over outhouses, "soaped" windows, smashed glass and broken fences, the last straw in Anoka apparently came in 1919, when a herd of cows was freed and descended on the town.

It was the morning after Halloween, and bovines were strolling Main Street, according to materials from the Anoka County Historical Society. Others made their way into the sheriff's office and inside a schoolhouse.

This was before Anoka crowned itself as the "Halloween Capital of the World" and when the holiday was all "trick" and little if any "treat." Across the United States, Halloween celebrations had yet to take the shape of the door-to-door candy quests, costume contests and zombie pub crawls we know today.

But one of the first communities in the U.S. to take a big step in that direction was Anoka, in 1920, when it threw a citywide celebration with a parade, music and treats.

The idea was to distract young people "enough so that they were having so much fun that they wouldn't do the pranks," said Rebecca Ebnet-Desens, executive director of the Anoka County Historical Society.

More than 100 years later, the city has grown the tradition and now wears its prank-prompted Halloween distinction as a badge of honor. Anoka's monthlong celebration includes parades, costume contests, a giant pumpkin expo, a haunted house, ghost tours and decorations all over.

Though many communities dealt with destructive Halloween pranks in the World War I era, Anoka was ahead of the curve on a solution, according to Lisa Morton, the author of "Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween."

"It is pretty early for a large civic celebration," Morton said. "They certainly were among the first."

So many overturned outhouses

How long Anoka dealt with pranks is unclear. A 1906 article in the Anoka County Union had this sarcastic line: "Halloween was observed in Anoka this year with all the fervor Young America is capable of."

That year, property damage was inflicted on a number of fences and a school building. A rock sailed through someone's window. The phrase "23 skidoo" was written in soap on store windows.

And, of course, outhouses were tipped over – perhaps the signature prank of the period.

The threat against outhouses was apparently so great that residents guarded the tiny facilities into the wee hours of the night, according to the book, "Anoka Halloween 100th Anniversary: 1920-2020."

Humorist and former radio personality Garrison Keillor, who is from Anoka, once wrote about hearing the stories from his father and other elders.

"Most farms near the Keillor farm still relied on outhouses in the Twenties and Thirties and beyond, and people must've used them warily around Halloween," Keillor wrote in an online column. "Perhaps they opted for chamber pots instead."

Other anecdotes about the era include dismantled wagons, a carriage appearing on the roof of a school and a "cow pie" left on the porch of a Champlin banker who had a certain savvy for foreclosing properties.

The cow invasion of 1919 sent community members scrambling for solutions. A civic leader named George Green is credited with the idea of throwing a celebration to distract troublemakers.

By that time, according to Morton, only a couple other communities in the U.S. had done something similar – Newark, N.J., in 1907 and Fort Worth, Texas, in 1916 among them. But it was far from a common practice.

Anoka went big for its first celebration – a parade, a bonfire, contests and then candy handed out afterward. The Anoka County Union described it as a "very novel party" with "nowhere near the usual amount of Hallowe'en depredations."

"The city was resplendent in myriad lights, store windows were beautifully decorated and the merchants vied with another in putting on contests of various kinds," the newspaper reported.

Celebrations catch on elsewhere

Although some pranks and vandalism continued after 1920, Anoka's Halloween party quickly grew and overshadowed the occasional mishap.

It took until the early 1930s for many communities to catch on to Anoka's strategy. Across the country, Halloween-related property destruction was so bad in 1933 that it was dubbed "Black Halloween," Morton said. Some communities thought about banning the holiday altogether.

Minneapolis was also among the first to adopt an early form of trick-or-treat by 1937, Morton said. The city controlled pranking by hosting "house-to-house parties."

"This was a really early version of trick-or-treat, where a group of houses in the neighborhood would get together and each house would do something in particular to entertain the kids," Morton said. "A couple of years after that is when we get trick-or-treating spreading across the country."

As modern traditions set in and pranking subsided, not every community kept up with their civic celebrations. But Anoka's has been held every year since 1919 – except during World War II. Its centerpiece event, the Grande Day Parade, attracts up to 100,000 spectators, organizers said.

"Anoka has been amazing for keeping theirs going for over a century now," Morton said.

Outhouse upheavals have also been kept to a minimum in recent years thanks to Anoka's ingenuity and indoor plumbing, said Sara Given, a volunteer coordinator for the Anoka County Historical Society.

"Nobody's tipped over an outhouse as far as I know," she said.