Postcard from the Past: Time to prepare for county fair and give a boost

By: Dick Perue

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Exhibits should be

prepared and arranged to give the proper display  

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Thus reads the headline and subhead of the Sept. 2, 1926 issue of The Riverton Review. This news item followed:

The season is at hand for county fairs. Despite the fact county fairs have been held year after year for a long period of time in many of our counties, interest is just as keen or keener now than was the case 10 years ago. 

A few comments along this line will not be out of place at this time.

Value of county fairs

Anyone who would tend to minimize the value of the county fairs and discount their true worth does not have a clear conception of what they have accomplished or may accomplish. 

In the first place, a county fair is a sort of mirror of the country’s agriculture for this particular season. It shows what the fields and pens and pastures have been producing and is also an index of what farm women have been accomplishing in the kitchens and sewing rooms.

In later years, especially since boys’ and girls’ club work has become so well recognized, the county fair affords a chance for real competition between these live-wire lads and lasses. 

In many cases, the county fair serves to determine for the boy and girl whether the club work they have been doing has been really all that it should be. Some of them realize – when they fail to win and the judge puts down their calf or pig at the bottom of the list – perhaps they have not been putting in their very best licks. 

The right sort of a boy or girl will go back home determined that next year there will be a real improvement in whatever they decide to bring to the fair. The boy or girl with the wrong viewpoint will perhaps become sore and resolve club work will have no further place in his or her life. That is the wrong idea and invariably reveals a “poor sport.”

Good advertising

Many exhibitors of livestock – and perhaps also of corn, small grains and fruit – find exhibiting at county fairs is a good advertisement and enables them to gain a wider list of customers for their product. 

Many livestock sales are made at county fairs to purchasers who are looking for quality stuff which comes up to their ideals.

The county fair in your county deserves your loyal support. Don’t imagine all of the work of making the fair successful should devolve upon a few of the faithful. If you are at all proud of your county, get into the county fair with your exhibits and help boost it all the time.

If your exhibit fails to win honors, don’t go home peeved about the matter and don’t resolve that you are through. A good loser is one who takes his defeats without kicking.

The county fair is an old time institution. It is worthy of all support possible and its success depends upon the hardy cooperation of the majority of the county’s farmers and livestock men. – Sheridan Journal