The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
1841 line · 1926 line
The fair carries two ages, and they measure different things. The fair's own banner claims it has entertained St. Joseph County "since 1841," and its grounds history begins with a first fair in the county's early years — the agricultural-society line that Howard's county history carries through fairs at South Bend and Mishawaka in the 1850s and the Portage Avenue grounds to 1872. Against that lineage, a South Bend Tribune anniversary account of 2001 records the fair's own committee finding, from the old program books, that the 4-H fair itself began in 1926 — correcting earlier written histories that had put it in 1927. The two numbers are not reconciled here: 1841 is the county-fair lineage, 1926 the 4-H fair's own start on its committee's reading, and the North Liberty host years fall somewhere in the wandering decades between the Playland run's end and the Lakeville move, their exact seasons a named gap whose settlers are the fair's program books and board minutes.