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THE 4-H FAIR, AT BOUNDARY SIZE
When the county fair returned, it returned as a children's fair, and Mishawaka was not among its seats. The 4-H fair's course stands whole in South Bend's farms article from the fair's own history: the Farmers Union fairs on the old river grounds; a first Interstate Fair at Springbrook Park — later Playland Park — running to 1925; then the fair moving as the townships offered it room, to North Liberty, where the cattle were shown in the street, and to Lakeville, where the livestock stood in tents, where in 1941 Brother Leo of Notre Dame Farms formed the committee that bought the lottery calves, and where admission was ten cents; back to Playland Park, with WSBT broadcasting daily; then incorporation as the St. Joseph County 4-H Fair, and the purchase of forty acres at Ironwood and Jackson in South Bend — today's grounds, since grown to eighty-seven acres with a covered grandstand of three thousand seats, held by a 501(c)(3) on one of only two privately owned fairgrounds in Indiana, by the fair's own account. The rotation touched Granger's townships and South Bend's parks. It never touched Mishawaka, and the build prints that plainly: in the fair's modern century as in its first, Mishawaka's relation to the institution is a share, not a seat.
The share, where the results name it, is real and recurring. In 2001 the South Bend Tribune's fair results named, among the county's winners, Kristin Schalliol of Dogwood Road, Mishawaka — grand champion rabbit — and Sarah Horn of Bittersweet Road, Mishawaka — reserve grand champion fancy duck and reserve grand champion Pekin duck. The build prints those at the strength the record carries them: exhibitors with Mishawaka addresses, on roads that lie in Penn Township, as the Tribune printed them — not as city-proper champions. A generation later the farm press named the share outright. The Farmer's Exchange reported the St. Joseph County 4-H livestock auction of July 2025 — $541,729.50 raised for the county's exhibitors — with Mishawaka's names in the champion rows: Anika Litteral of Mishawaka standing second in the swine sale with her reserve champion hog, a support group paying $11.50 a pound, $3,335, for the 290-pounder; Stephen Knopp of Mishawaka selling a basket representing his grand champion milking doe for $1,500 to a buyer's group; Elizabeth Applegate of Mishawaka exhibiting the grand champion meat goat; Joshua Sobieralski of Mishawaka auctioning his grand champion roaster pair for $200. Four Mishawaka exhibitors in the champion and reserve-champion rows of one year's auction report is the modern share at its documented size: the city's farm children — for most of them are Penn Township's farm children carrying the city's name — show at South Bend's fair, win at it, and are counted in its paper. The fair's own numbering quarrel is respected here as South Bend prints it and not re-litigated: the fair's banner counts "entertaining St. Joseph County since 1841," its 2001 anniversary research traced the 4-H fair's beginning to 1926 against some written histories' 1927, and the Tribune billed the fair of 3–11 July 2026 as the 101st annual St. Joe County 4-H Fair. All three statements stand where their owners printed them; Mishawaka's share does not depend on any of them.
Principal sources: the St. Joseph County 4-H Fair's own history (4hfair.com), as printed in South Bend's farms article; South Bend Tribune fair results, 2001 (Mishawaka-address exhibitors); Farmer's Exchange, 11 July 2025 — the 4-H auction report, read first-hand.