The Fair Begins in May

It is a May evening and the courthouse windows are open for the first time this year. The maple outside the east door has come into full leaf since the last meeting, and the air on the second floor still holds the damp cold of the spring mud, but nobody has lit the stove. Somewhere below, a clerk is closing up. On the long table in the jury room, a man has spread out last year's premium list and is going through it line by line, a pencil behind his ear, grudging every increase.

These are the officers of the county agricultural society. If the county fair has a season, most people would say it is October, the smell of corn dogs and diesel and canvas, the dairy barn steam on a frosty morning. But the fair is conceived here, in May, in these rooms. The October fair is only the harvest of decisions made on nights like this one.

Outside, the last of the evening's birds goes quiet. The man with the pencil reads out a proposed prize for the best bushel of wheat, and a man near the stove objects that the wording will let the judges accept shriveled grain. Somebody else raises the matter of where the cattle will be tied. The oldest man at the table says nothing yet. This is the standard business of the agricultural society, and it is older than almost anything else on the county calendar.

A New England invention

The American county fair did not begin as a carnival. It began as a classroom. In the early years of the republic, farming was learned the way it had been learned for centuries, from the father, from the neighbor, from the old almanac, and the scientific agriculture that would later reshape the country had not yet reached most farm gates. The men who tried to change that were the agricultural societies: groups of substantial farmers who met through the winter and spring to argue about lime and drainage, crop rotation and bloodstock, and to decide what prize to put on a sow's farrowing record.

The two are connected by a single story. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, a Massachusetts livestock man named Elkanah Watson led a pair of merino sheep to the green in the center of his town and invited the neighboring farmers to come and look at them. They came. They looked. They stood in the road arguing about wool the way men argue now about tractor warranties. Watson took the lesson and made an institution of it: the exhibition, the public display of improved livestock and improved crops, put on in the fall when the harvest had proved what a man's methods had done.

The idea spread the way good barns spread, by sight and by argument. County after county chartered a society, and the societies in turn invented the fair: the judging ring, the premium list, the silver cup handed over in the chill of an October afternoon. By the middle of the nineteenth century the fair was the annual reckoning of every farmer in the county, the one day a year when a man could see, all at once, what everyone else had been doing.

Temperamentally, the people who ran these societies were the kind of people who read government bulletins in the evening. There was not a romantic among them. But the institution they built turned out to be one of the most durable inventions of American public life, for the simple reason that it worked.

The work of May

May was the one slack month on the northern farm calendar. The ground had finally dried enough for planting, and the planting was done, but the haying had not yet begun, and the sheep had been shorn. A farmer could leave the farm for an evening in May without feeling the world end. The societies knew this. Most of them scheduled their annual meeting for the spring, and the meeting doubled as the planning session for the fall fair, because the fair required lead time.

The premium list looks like a modest piece of the fair's machinery, but it is the engine. In the spring, the officers sat down and wrote out the categories for the October exhibition: best bull of any age, best heifer, best sow with litter, best horse on the track; best acre of corn, best bushel of wheat, best potatoes, best onions, best butter, best cheese, best bread, best homespun blanket, best quilted counterpane. They decided whether the prize would be a silver cup or a dollar amount or only the glory of the certificate, and they set the entry fee that would keep the gate respectable.

Every one of those decisions was made now, in May, so that the printed list could reach the townships before the summer's labor began. The breeding of a mare, the size of a boar, the condition of a feeding steer, all of it had to be planned in the spring if it was to be shown in the fall. The most important equipment at the fair has always been the least visible: the handwritten minutes of a May meeting, and the list that tells the judges what to judge.

The May meeting had other business. Some societies bought improved seed and offered it to members at a fair price, on the theory that a good strain of wheat would travel faster across the county than any lecture. Others voted the money for the fall show and appointed the committee that would secure the grounds: the pasture at the edge of town, the patch of timber that would shelter the stock, the lane that would have to be graded for the wagons. It was the same every year, and the arguments were the same every year.

The fair outgrows its mother

The fair has outgrown the society so completely that the connection is now a curiosity. The modern fair is a crowd, not a class. The railroad brought the first crowds in the late nineteenth century, and then came the vendors and the midway and the automobile lots laid out by the acre, and the fair became the county's greatest annual act of self-entertainment. The agricultural society shrank inside it the way a town center shrinks when the interstate bypasses the square. A handful of fairs still keep the old arrangement plainly in view: a board of directors that meets in a cinder-block office in the spring to go over the premium list, and that board descends in an unbroken line from the men in the courthouse.

But the order of things has not reversed. The board still meets in the spring. The list still goes out before the summer work begins. The fair is still, underneath all its color and noise, an old act of accounting that has to be arranged far in advance. The difference is that the meeting now has more to account for: the demolition derby and the quilting exhibit and the livestock auction and the name of the band beside the grandstand.

There is an office somewhere past the midway where the superintendent keeps the books, and the next spring is already in it: the calendar with the dates penciled in, the lease on the grounds, the draft of next year's list with its columns of possible prizes. The fair is not an event. It is a promise that a small committee makes to itself every spring, in a room that smells like coffee and old paper, and honors at the end of October.

The courthouse in May is a good place to be reminded of that. The windows are open. The maple is green. The man with the pencil has finished arguing and is holding the list at arm's length, as if its weight could tell him whether it was too much to ask — or too little — of the county's farmers. Outside, the light has gone completely out of the evening, and somewhere a door slams. They will finish the list before they leave. They always have.