Horse racing at the fairs — the course stood on South Bend ground

Horse racing was the St. Joseph County fair's great draw in its nineteenth-century life, and every yard of that racing stood west of the Mishawaka line. The fair's own frame — its founding, its grounds, its one fall spent at Mishawaka — stands whole in the fairs section of this history; what belongs here is the racing itself, taken from the racing side of the record. The county agricultural society's fairs on the river grounds at South Bend, in the run the county record documents from 1881 to 1903, ran their programs "with horse racing the great draw" — the phrase the record itself uses — and the racing was the fair's public engine in the years when a fair's gate was made or lost at the track rail. The fair of 22 September 1886 supplies the era's most vivid single item: a hailstorm struck the grounds mid-fair, and the contemporary account has horses struck by the hailstones bolting with the buggies behind them — an exhibition-week scene, printed in the South Bend record, that fixes horseflesh at the center of the fair's ground plan.

When the fair's ground changed, the racing's home changed with it. The grandstand at Playland Park, on South Bend ground, is the documented fair-era home of the county's horse racing in the record the South Bend history carries — the park's track and stand served the racing that the river grounds had hosted before it. Mishawaka's share in all of this is the share the fairs file prints: the city hosted the county society's fair exactly once in the documented record, in the fall of 1852, the society's second annual fair — and no racing at that fair appears in any record. The claim is not made that no horse ran at Mishawaka in 1852; the claim is the record's: the one documented Mishawaka fair is silent on racing, and every documented fair race of the county's nineteenth and early twentieth centuries belongs to South Bend ground.

• The county fairs on the river grounds, 1881–1903, "with horse racing the great draw," and the hailstorm fair of 22 September 1886: the county record as carried in the South Bend history's farms and fairs files, read first-hand
• Playland Park's grandstand as horse racing's documented fair-era home: the South Bend history's racing file, read first-hand
• The fall 1852 fair at Mishawaka and its silence on racing: the fairs section of this history, read first-hand