South Bend Fairs: The County Fair and the Ones Before It

Fairs · The county fair, from the courthouse lawn to Ironwood and Jackson

A fair, in the form Indiana invented it, is a judged exhibition of a county's work: animals, crops, preserves and needlework entered for premiums, with a racetrack and a midway gathered around the judging. South Bend's fair record is a record of grounds. No fair in this work moved more often or left a better paper trail of its moving: a courthouse lawn, a two acre lot on Washington Street, seven and a half acres on Portage Avenue that a civil war turned into a camp, forty acres between the two cities that a city inherited as a park, an interstate fair on a trolley park, a decade in the townships at North Liberty and Lakeville, twelve summers as a guest inside an amusement park, and at last, in 1958, a permanent home of its own at Ironwood and Jackson, bought the modern way by an incorporated fair on nonprofit books. The fair's banner claims 1841. Its documents, in the county history of 1907, are solid by 1852. This section prints both, labels each for what it is, and borrows nothing from the other St. Joseph County, the one in Michigan whose Grange Fair at Centreville owns an earlier and richer paper trail that search results lay constantly beside this one and that is not ours.