The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Fairs · The county fair, the state fair, and the fair inside the festivals
A fair, in the form Indiana invented it, is a judged exhibition of a county's work: animals, crops, preserves and needlework entered for premiums, with a racetrack and a midway gathered around the judging. Fort Wayne's fair record runs on four grounds and in three forms. The county fair began on Thomas Swinney's west end lands, in a founding year the record brackets and this section prints as a bracket. The state fair came once, in 1865, and left the fullest numbers any Fort Wayne fair ever printed. The county fair then spent years as a guest, in the War Memorial Coliseum and other locations its own history does not name, before it bought its permanence the modern way, with a county land grant and a self-supporting nonprofit on Carroll Road in 1989. And downtown, the city's great festival carried fair elements inside it, a fine arts fair, a crafters market, rides and concessions, for more than fifty summers. What follows is the fair as history: judged, premiumed and gated, told apart from the festivals it resembles, with every gap in the record named rather than filled.
The fair on Swinney's grounds: the [1847-1874] bracket
1847 or 1874 - by September, annually for many years
The grounds: Thomas Swinney came to Fort Wayne shortly before 1824, began his homestead in 1844, and held the west end lands where the St. Marys bends away from the town. His property was gathering ground before it was fair…
Fort Wayne entertains the state fair: October 1865
2 - 7 October 1865
The invitation: Once, and only once in the record found, the fair that came to Fort Wayne was the state's. The Thirteenth Indiana State Fair was held here from Monday 2 October to Saturday 7 October 1865, on grounds which now…
The form itself: what a county fair was for
1830s - 1850s, Indiana
The idea: The county fair was tried by local agricultural associations in Indiana from the 1830s, as a way for farming families to come together and exchange agricultural methods, personally developed farming implements and…
The guest years: the Coliseum and other locations
Before 1989
The fair without a home: Between the Swinney grounds years and 1989, the Allen County Fair's address is the thinnest line in its own history. The fairgrounds organization's official history says it in one sentence: prior to…
A home of its own: Carroll Road, 1989
1989 -
The founding: In 1989 the Allen County Fair got the thing it had never had, a permanent home built for it. With an original land grant from the county, the Allen County Fairgrounds began as a self-supporting organization in 1989…
The 4-H engine: the fair's permanent exhibitor
1904 -
The roots: A county fair's exhibitors do not assemble themselves; in Indiana they are raised, club by club, by 4-H. Indiana 4-H was established in 1904 in Hamilton County by John F. Haines, a school superintendent, from the boys'…
The year the gates stayed shut: 2020, and the return
2020 - 2022
The cancellation: The modern fair's one fully documented interruption is the pandemic year. The fairgrounds' own notice states it flatly: the 2020 Allen County Public Fair has been cancelled. What replaced it was the exhibitor…
The street fair downtown: Three Rivers, in fair terms only
1969 - 2025
The fair elements: The Three Rivers Festival is a festival, and its full record, parade, raft race, fireworks and all, stands in this work's festival material. This section carries it only where it is fair-shaped, because for…
A festival, not a fair: the Johnny Appleseed distinction
1974 or 1975 - every September since
The distinction: The Johnny Appleseed Festival is often shelved with the fairs in fair and festival directories, and this section prints the correction in so many words: it is not a fair. It has no premiums, no livestock judging…
The fairgrounds' other lives, and the line of the grounds
1843 - 2026
The year-round grounds: The Carroll Road fairgrounds were built to end the guest years, and they earn their permanence the way modern fairgrounds do, by working all year. The organization rents its facilities for public and…
.jpg){kind=link}