The best part of summer
Aug. 22nd, 2005 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
debgeislerWhen we were growing up, the best part of summer was the end of August. You had a chance of catching a breeze coming across the lake, maybe...and even if you weren't excited about going back to school (I usually was...geek), there was the Lorain County fair. I just skimmed the Cleveland Plain Dealer web site, and they were talking about the fair starting this week...and it all sort of came back.
The smells, of course...especially at the beginning of the fair. All those barns filled with fresh-cut hay, feed, clover. Loading in the horses (well, and cows and rabbits and chickens and pigs...but we were horse 4H folks, and my sister's nag Black Jack was the meanest, nastiest, biggest horse in our 4H club...16.5 hands of cussedness)...seeing how many flies you could kill (and defeating the 7-at-one-blow fairy tale count regularly).
The sounds...a full horse barn. Little kids with huge eyes dragging their parents from stall to stall. The barkers on the midway. Evening concerts (we usually skipped those, not being CW aficionados) and tractor pulls and the caller in the rodeo and the "chirpchirp" commands of dressage riders.
But the thing I remember most was just how damned *big* the fair was. And this was "big" grownup, not "big" kid. The last time I was at the fair was sometime in the early 90s, on a visit back to Ohio, and it was even *bigger* than I'd remembered.
County fairs are a major entertainment in the midwest, particularly in counties like Lorain, where there's still a pretty big chunk of rural and farming. We had Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Campfire and so on...but 4H was the club of choice, and the FFA (Future Farmers of America) had a big membership in my high school. [My high school graduating class just celebrated our 30 year reunion...I couldn't attend, because of the Glasgow and Madison trips...and missed the 20 in 1995 because of the Glasgow trip. This is a weird pattern.]
How big is the Lorain County Fair? Well, here's a map of what the grounds look like, and you'll notice things like this stack of barns (#s 8-14 or so, in particular). I remember those horse barns...and if memory serves, each held about 200 horses in loose boxes. These are not little bitty barns.
This is why the kids with the rabbits were always jealous of the kids with the horses, of course. You could *ride* your exhibit around anywhere on the grounds (except on the midway area, where you could ride up to it, but had to hitch your horse during "high" hours on the fairway (or stick to the bridle paths if you were just riding and not stopping). It's really tough to get much mileage out of a rabbit.
When I lived in Illinois, the DuQuoin State Fair struck me as a bit on the small side for a *state* fair (600 acres of grounds), but it was still a proper fair. Not enough horses, too many pigs, but okay nevertheless.
But here in New England, the fairs sort of suck. Eastern Massachusetts' largest fair is the Topsfield Fair (Topsfield is the next town to the north of us). Their fairgrounds map is enlightening. Consider that first map (of the Lorain County Fairgrounds) again...then consider that the building labeled "cattle barn" on the Topsfield map is slightly smaller than the barns pictured in the Lorain County map. That gives one a sense of scale.
I adore fairs, though, and even Topsfield has its charms. Not enough horses...but they do some pretty cool exhibition riding of draft teams, mostly American and Brabant Belgians, with the occasional Clydesdale tossed in, bless their furry little toes. No Shires or Percherons or Suffolks, though. (I overheard one little child saying, of the Belgians, "those must be the biggest horses in the world!" Nope. Heaviest, yes. But the Shires outstrip them in height by quite a bit.)
One of the quaintest fairs we were ever at was in Rutland, Vt. This is the Vermont State Fair, and it's quite nice, if small. Fair grounds in New England all seem to suffer from the same sort of problem: not enough space. There's rarely much livery for horses on the grounds, although there might be one-day stabling. And you really don't *need* a horse to get around (which is a good thing, 'cuz they wouldn't let you have one).
But it's cute (with a really annoying web site), and so it's probably worth a drive by if you're in Vt. the first week of September or so.
The smells, of course...especially at the beginning of the fair. All those barns filled with fresh-cut hay, feed, clover. Loading in the horses (well, and cows and rabbits and chickens and pigs...but we were horse 4H folks, and my sister's nag Black Jack was the meanest, nastiest, biggest horse in our 4H club...16.5 hands of cussedness)...seeing how many flies you could kill (and defeating the 7-at-one-blow fairy tale count regularly).
The sounds...a full horse barn. Little kids with huge eyes dragging their parents from stall to stall. The barkers on the midway. Evening concerts (we usually skipped those, not being CW aficionados) and tractor pulls and the caller in the rodeo and the "chirpchirp" commands of dressage riders.
But the thing I remember most was just how damned *big* the fair was. And this was "big" grownup, not "big" kid. The last time I was at the fair was sometime in the early 90s, on a visit back to Ohio, and it was even *bigger* than I'd remembered.
County fairs are a major entertainment in the midwest, particularly in counties like Lorain, where there's still a pretty big chunk of rural and farming. We had Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Campfire and so on...but 4H was the club of choice, and the FFA (Future Farmers of America) had a big membership in my high school. [My high school graduating class just celebrated our 30 year reunion...I couldn't attend, because of the Glasgow and Madison trips...and missed the 20 in 1995 because of the Glasgow trip. This is a weird pattern.]
How big is the Lorain County Fair? Well, here's a map of what the grounds look like, and you'll notice things like this stack of barns (#s 8-14 or so, in particular). I remember those horse barns...and if memory serves, each held about 200 horses in loose boxes. These are not little bitty barns.
This is why the kids with the rabbits were always jealous of the kids with the horses, of course. You could *ride* your exhibit around anywhere on the grounds (except on the midway area, where you could ride up to it, but had to hitch your horse during "high" hours on the fairway (or stick to the bridle paths if you were just riding and not stopping). It's really tough to get much mileage out of a rabbit.
When I lived in Illinois, the DuQuoin State Fair struck me as a bit on the small side for a *state* fair (600 acres of grounds), but it was still a proper fair. Not enough horses, too many pigs, but okay nevertheless.
But here in New England, the fairs sort of suck. Eastern Massachusetts' largest fair is the Topsfield Fair (Topsfield is the next town to the north of us). Their fairgrounds map is enlightening. Consider that first map (of the Lorain County Fairgrounds) again...then consider that the building labeled "cattle barn" on the Topsfield map is slightly smaller than the barns pictured in the Lorain County map. That gives one a sense of scale.
I adore fairs, though, and even Topsfield has its charms. Not enough horses...but they do some pretty cool exhibition riding of draft teams, mostly American and Brabant Belgians, with the occasional Clydesdale tossed in, bless their furry little toes. No Shires or Percherons or Suffolks, though. (I overheard one little child saying, of the Belgians, "those must be the biggest horses in the world!" Nope. Heaviest, yes. But the Shires outstrip them in height by quite a bit.)
One of the quaintest fairs we were ever at was in Rutland, Vt. This is the Vermont State Fair, and it's quite nice, if small. Fair grounds in New England all seem to suffer from the same sort of problem: not enough space. There's rarely much livery for horses on the grounds, although there might be one-day stabling. And you really don't *need* a horse to get around (which is a good thing, 'cuz they wouldn't let you have one).
But it's cute (with a really annoying web site), and so it's probably worth a drive by if you're in Vt. the first week of September or so.