The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
FALL 1852 · THE SECOND ANNUAL FAIR OF THE ST. JOSEPH COUNTY AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY
The verdict is positive, and it rests on the society's own records as the county's first historian printed them. The St. Joseph County Agricultural Society that held the fair of 1852 was the society's second organization. A first society, organized in 1841 under the state act of 19 February 1838, had offered a premium list of twenty-three articles — the best ten yards of jeans, the best ten yards of flannel, the best cheese of not less than ten pounds, the best specimen of beet sugar, the best half acre of rutabagas, the best five acres of tame grass, the best cultivated farm of not less than thirty acres — and held exactly one exhibition, on the second Monday in October 1841, before lapsing in a county too thinly settled and too short of money to sustain it. The reorganization came at the courthouse on Saturday, 19 April 1851: George C. Merrifield, of Penn Township — Mishawaka's own township — was elected chairman, and Schuyler Colfax was made secretary and reported the constitution, framed to the legislature's enactment on agricultural societies, from the committee charged with drafting it. The society's first fair followed that fall in South Bend: on 6 September 1851 the president and directors resolved that the first annual fair be held on Thursday, 16 October 1851, and the exhibition was held in the courthouse yard. The society's books, as Chapman prints them, kept the fair's small honest arithmetic: receipts $185.00, expenses $110.08, balance in the treasury $68.92.
The officers elected on 3 January 1852 put the fair's direction partly in Mishawaka hands before the fair itself moved: Powers Greene was president, John J. Deming vice president, J. M. Veasey secretary, William Miller treasurer, and the director for Penn Township was G. C. Merrifield — the same Merrifield who had chaired the reorganization meeting. On 5 June 1852, Chapman records from the society's minutes, "it was decided to hold the fair for that year at Mishawaka, and a list of premiums was made out and ordered published." The fair followed in the fall. In Chapman's words, from the society's record: "The fair for the second year of the society was therefore held in Mishawaka, the good citizens of that place paying all the expenses thereof. The annual address was delivered by John B. Niles, of La Porte." No account of receipts and expenditures appears on the society's records for 1852, 1853 or 1854 — the one financial trace of the Mishawaka year is that the secretary was allowed ten dollars for his services for 1852. Chapman's judgment of the fair itself is the society's judgment preserved: "The Mishawaka Fair was a very satisfactory exhibition for that day, and the members of the society were well pleased with their efforts."
The strongest testimony to the Mishawaka fair came a year later, from the rival town's press, and Chapman preserved it. The third annual fair was held at South Bend on 4 and 5 October 1853, on two leased acres on Washington Street three blocks west of the courthouse — land the society afterward bought — and $198.50 was distributed in premiums. The South Bend Forum, published at the time of that fair, commented, as Chapman quotes it: "Those who can remember and compare things, affirm that this exhibition was inferior to that of last year at Mishawaka, in all respects, except the stock and pomological departments." A hometown paper, reviewing a hometown fair, told its readers that Mishawaka's fair had beaten it in everything but the livestock and the fruit. That sentence, printed in South Bend in 1853 and carried into the county history in 1880, is the measure of what the town did with its one year as host.
Two disclosures belong with the verdict. First, the witness: the two printed county histories appear to confirm each other — Timothy Edward Howard's 1907 history states the fair in nearly Chapman's words ("In the fall of 1852 the fair was held at Mishawaka, the people of the town paying all the expenses. An excellent address was made at this meeting by the Hon. John B. Niles, of Laporte") — but Howard footnotes Chapman, page 561, as his source for the society's early record. The two books are therefore one witness, the society's own minutes as Chapman printed them in 1880, and not two independent confirmations; the fair is printed at that strength, which is strong — a society's minute book, a named decision date, a named speaker, a contemporary newspaper comparison — and no stronger. Second, the limits: neither Chapman nor Howard gives the fair's exact dates or the ground within Mishawaka where it stood. What the record establishes beyond dispute is the fact, the year, the host town's payment of all expenses, the address, and the verdict of the day.
Principal sources: Charles C. Chapman, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1880), chapter XIII, "Agricultural Societies," pp. 561–565, read first-hand — the society's minutes, accounts and premium lists as there printed, including the South Bend Forum comment of October 1853. Timothy Edward Howard, History of St. Joseph County (1907), vol. 1, pp. 267–268, read first-hand — repeating Chapman and citing him at p. 561.