The city at the state fair: a searched record, and its gap

The city at the STATE fair — named gap

Lead: The state fair is the one fair at which a farm township should be findable by name — in premium lists, on judging committees, among exhibitors — and this row searched the nineteenth-century state fair record for this town's names and prints the search honestly: the instruments exist, the town's names were not extracted from them in this section, and the gap is named with its settler.

The instruments are real and reachable in part. The Indiana State Board of Agriculture's annual reports carry the state fair's proceedings and its awards of premiums — the 1880 volume's contents alone run from officers and proceedings to “Awards of premiums at State Fair” at page 125 — and those reports, with the earlier premium lists printed in the agricultural and general press of the 1850s, are held in the HathiTrust and Google Books runs the row specifies. What this section actually did was search those runs at index and contents level for New Carlisle, Olive Township and Terre Coupee exhibitors, committee members and exhibits, including the 1858-era premium-list material in circulation. No town name was returned at a strength this build can print: no exhibitor, no committeeman, no exhibit is claimed for New Carlisle at the state fair in this article, and none is denied either — the premium lists are long, name-dense and imperfectly indexed, and an index-level blank in them is not a finding that the township never showed. The row therefore closes as a named gap: the Indiana State Board of Agriculture annual reports and state fair premium lists, read page by page for Olive Township and New Carlisle names, are the settler, and until that read is done the town's state-fair roll stands unwritten rather than empty. One boundary is kept while the gap stands open: the St. Joseph County fair, and the county agricultural society's own fairs, are other grounds and other legs, and nothing from them is imported here to fill a state-fair blank.

Sources:

1. Annual Report of the Indiana State Board of Agriculture (1880 volume, via Google Books) — contents: proceedings of State Fair meetings; Awards of premiums at State Fair, p. 125.
2. State fair premium-list material, 1850s, as circulated in the agricultural and newspaper press (Hoosier State Chronicles runs read at index level for this row).