Southern Missouri's guide to entertainment, travel, and community

COUNTRY FAIRS
A Celebration of Progress & Nostalgia

by Bill Hendee

Summertime means different things to different people. For some, it is weekends at the lake or the beach. For others, it means hard work in the hot sun. Summer is temperate and pleasant in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, arid in Southern California, oppressively humid along the Gulf Coast. Yet, summer brings one event that is a constant regardless of temperature or locale: the country fair. No matter the scale of the venue, from the traditional county fair to a mammoth regional expo or state fair, fairs bring together diverse groups of people to experience the richness of an American tradition as old as the country itself. Country fairs have become a conglomeration of exhibits and entertainment that represent a wholesome old fashioned form of family entertainment. Fairs conjure up images of amusement rides, cotton candy, livestock competitions, and exhibits featuring the latest mechanical marvels. All fairs share a common theme: the celebration of community progress.

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Deep Roots

The history of fairs can be traced back thousands of years to merchant bazaars in Mesopotamia and along the Mediterranean. These merchant gatherings featured a variety of goods for barter and for sale, including raw materials like metals and textiles, as well as finished products. Many of these early trade bazaars became tied to religious festivals that would draw together large groups of people. The Oxford English Reference Dictionary attributes the word fair to the Latin word feriae, meaning holiday. In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, fields adjacent to temples would be set aside for merchants to display and sell their goods during religious celebrations. During the Christian era, European churches sponsored fairs in conjunction with feast days in order to generate revenue. Similar events endure today in the form of church bazaars. As fairs evolved in Western Europe, other elements such as entertainment were added to the mix, bringing these early fairs closer to what we would recognize today.

Fairs took hold slowly in colonial North America. Indeed, it seems that the colonists rediscovered the idea rather than having imported it directly from Europe. Early North American fairs returned the focus to commerce, specifically agriculture. Among the earliest was a livestock fair held in 1644 in New Haven, Connecticut. The first large scale fair was held in Windsor, Nova Scotia in 1765. The Hants County Exhibition, as it is now known, was originally devoted to agriculture and is still in operation today. The Niagara Agricultural Society sponsored a similar exhibition in 1792 that also persists today. Many small, localized fairs were also common in the eighteenth century throughout French Canada.

The Father of the Fair

The spread of country fairs throughout the United States has been attributed to a New Englander named Elkanah Watson. Watson apprenticed with noted Rhode Island merchant John Brown in the years before the American Revolution and later made his career as an entrepreneur. Watson made, lost, and recovered several fortunes along the way in enterprises as diverse as farming, banking, and canal development. He was acquainted with George Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin among others. Like many gentleman-farmers of his generation, Watson was a proponent of “scientific agriculture” and lobbied for the creation of state-run agriculture schools and local agricultural societies to promote commerce.

In 1807, Elkanah Watson settled in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, not far from the Berkshire Mountains and Albany, New York. There, Watson raised imported Merino sheep, which were prized for the uniform quality of their fleece. Watson believed that cloth manufactured from Merino wool could successfully compete with the finest English imports. Intent on convincing his neighbors to raise sheep as well, Watson displayed his own animals in a small exhibition under an elm tree in the town square, clanging an old ship’s bell to draw the attention of passers-by. Watson later wrote that “many farmers, and even women, were excited by curiosity to attend this first novel and humble exhibition.”

Watson then helped organize the first Berkshire Cattle Show in 1810 featuring “386 sheep, 109 oxen, 9 cows, 7 folds, 3 heifers, 2 calves, and a boar.” Women’s handiwork was added as a feature in 1813. Watson proved his marketing acumen by promoting the events as family friendly gatherings focused on education and commerce, thus assuaging people’s concerns about attending a non-religious celebration. The success of the first show led to the founding in 1811 of the Berkshire Agricultural Society, the first permanent agricultural association in the country. The Berkshire Society expanded the Cattle Show over the next decade to include manufacturing exhibits, a parade, and a dance. Finally, in 1820, Watson produced his Treatise on the Berkshire Model, a blueprint for organizing agricultural societies and fairs that would spread like wildfire across the continent.

Progress

By the time of the Civil War, agricultural societies in twenty-five states were mounting annual fairs. The success of these local and county fairs prompted state governments to consider exhibitions as a means to showcase their achievements. New York became the first state to hold a state fair in 1841 for “the promotion of agricultural and household manufacturers”, followed by Michigan in 1849 and several other Midwestern states shortly thereafter. While agriculture continued to be the centerpiece of fairs and expos, the exhibitions grew to include technological displays, celebrities, crafts, youth groups, entertainers and amusements, and crop and livestock competitions. Nearly every state was mounting an annual fair by the end of the nineteenth century, in addition to the scores of county and regional fairs that had spread across the nation.

Near the beginning of the twentieth century, the scale of the country fair evolved yet again. Chicago hosted the first World’s Fair in 1893 designed to highlight America’s technological and commercial progress. The event introduced the Ferris wheel and other mechanical amusement rides that would become a common spectacle at country fairs for decades to come. Additionally, fairs of all sizes would offer the public a glimpse at other marvels such as the electric light, the automobile, and solar power. As their emphasis shifted from education and commerce to entertainment, fairs took on a more carnival like atmosphere and became perceived in many ways a youth oriented activity.

Today, fairs have become a celebration both of progress and nostalgia. Whether visiting an old fashioned country fair or a sprawling state expo, one is likely to find antique cars displayed alongside the latest farming technology. Many fair attractions such as sideshows are a thing of the past, but the romance of a first date on the Ferris wheel remains. The heart of the country fair— commercial agriculture— beats as strong as it did in Elkanah Watson’s day. Livestock and crop competitions are still a central part of most fairs across the country regardless of the scale. The more than 3,200 fairs held throughout North America each year testify to their enduring appeal.