“Fair has reflected county for more than 100 years” from the August 10, 1971 Door County Advocate
OLD FAIR PICTURES — Sixty two years ago the Door County Fair was already a thriving institution. People come by foot and buggy to take in the exhibits and entertainment. Note the packed grandstand for the mule race. Otis Olson brought in the pictures.
Fair has reflected county for more than 100 years
By STANLEY GREENE
After having survived the vagaries of weather and economy for more than a century, the Door County Fair can claim to be a very durable institution. It is surprising to find how many times in the past public opinion has pronounced the fair dead, only to find the corpse scrambling out of the grave more alive than it ever had been in the past.
Of course the fair has not always been an annual event. There was a time when the county had no fairs for a period of 14 years. But its vitality has increased with age. During the first half of its existence the fair averaged three appearances in every five years. During the last half of its life, it has averaged four appearances every five years.
Door County’s first fair was a by-product of the Civil War.
The county’s economy for a long period of time was based on fish and lumber. The financial panic of 1857 destroyed the lumber business of the area which only came to life again in the closing days of the Civil War. In the first six months of 1864 the population of the village of Sturgeon Bay suddenly doubled. Intoxicated by the heady feeling returning prosperity, the thoughts of community leaders turned to projects for the improvement and advancement of the area, and among these was a county fair.
Under the Laws of 1858 the new State of Wisconsin was attempting to promote agriculture and industry by helping to subsidize county fairs. Any county with a duly incorporated Agriculture Society with $100 in its treasury was entitled to another $100 from the state for the purpose of promoting such a fair.
After one failure such a society was organized in 1865 but the raising of the $100 from the state required four more years. It was not until Sept. of 1869 that the Society was able to certify to the state its financial competency and receive the $100 of fair subsidy. To make sure that it would have a $100 of matching funds to qualify for the subsidy in 1870 the Society decided to spend only half of its funds on its first fair.
$50 purchased 32 acres of land a quarter of a mile east of Bradley Lake; the other $50 went for lumber and hardware. Then a community lumbering bee cleared a site and a building bee erected a number of sheds and fences.
With the expenditure of $100 and a lot of hard work Door County staged its first fair late in October of 1869.
The managers of the fair — George Bassford, Jesse Kimber and Joseph Harris, Sr. — ran the fair economically. Prize winning exhibitions were awarded diplomas in place of cash — although $1 was charged for exhibiting. Fees were levied for the operation of refreshment stands but “ardent spirits” (the bottled variety) could not be sold or consumed on the fair ground. Because there were no purses there were no horse races but some very exciting ox pulling contests were staged. The highlight of the one evening performance was the speech delivered by George Pinney, manager and partner in the Pinney-Lawrence Nursery and former Methodist circuit rider.
Despite the austerity of its managers and the coldness of the weather the fair was a resounding success, promotionally and financially. Its managers must have smiled contentedly as they counted the receipts and laid plans for the next fair in 1870.
The list of prize winners in that first fair contains some interesting entries. Robert Laurie, distinguished as a builder of fast sailing boats, won first place for the best and the greatest variety of apples exhibited. Joseph Zettel, who would achieve national recognition for his apples, had to be satisfied by winning first prize for the best pair of working oxen. Joseph Harris Sr. won with his plums and Jesse Kimber with his cabbages.
For the next decade, the county fair became an annual event. With primitive roads made more primitive by fall rains, for the first few years there were few exhibitors and little attendance from the extremities of the county. But over the years the fair slowly became in fact what it always had been in name, a county fair.
Then factional strife began to disintegrate the Agriculture Society, followed by financial problems created by poor exhibits and lack of attendance. It was plain that the county fair was dying and many said that after 1880 it was in fact dead, with only the smell remaining. There was unfair for four years. In 1885 an attempt was made to revive it by combining it with an Encampment of the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic from the adjoining counties. Three hundred veterans and a dance made the event a financial success but encampments were not held on an annual basis so the fair relapsed. Another attempt at revival in 1888 only plunged the Society deeper into debt and the fair grounds had to be mortgaged. A third attempt in 1890 kept the fair sputtering for three years. But the end came in 1892 when not even a double balloon ascension couldn’t lift the fair out of the financial morass into which it had sunk.
The panic of 1893 finished matters off, a panic so bad that it closed 491 banks and 15,000 business establishments in a single year. Among its victims was the Door County Agriculture Society. The mortgage on the fair grounds and buildings, far in excess of their value, was foreclosed and the Society turned from the promotion of fairs to the promotion of agriculture in its monthly meetings.
During the next 15 years Door County climbed out of the sawdust filled rut of a logging economy into a new kind of prosperity. Agriculture finally came of age. Dairy herds and cheese factories dotted the peninsula. Men like Zettel, Hatch and Goff developed and advertised its orchards. Edward and William Reynolds firmly established a Pea Canning industry. And then, to the last county in the state which did not have it, the railroad came.
All that the county lacked was a fair.
In 1906 J. C. Dana, T. H. Hopkins, Job Tong, Henry Graass and Henry Fetzer became the incorporators of a new Door County Agriculture Society capitalized at $10,000 with 60% of the stock subscribed and 20% paid in. The purpose of the Society was to provide the county with a new fair grounds and a new fair. To this worthy cause the Door County Board of Supervisors contributed, in cash and land, the equivalent of $2,500.
A new site, 40 acres on the eastern side of the city, was purchased for $3,000 (in 1869, 32 acres had cost only $50), and in the summer of 1908 work was rushed on a grandstand, race track, exhibition and office buildings.
The previous year, 1907, one of Door county’s most impatient promoters, Barney Hahn, farmer, hotel owner, theater operator and racing enthusiast, found the slowness of the Society in developing the fairgrounds too irksome. Refusing to wait another year, he staged a private fair of his own on his farm just north of the city on the Egg Harbor Road. The fair had everything — including horse races and a sell-out crowd that clearly demonstrated public interest in the renewal of fair activity.
The first fair held on the new grounds opened Sept. 29, 1908. Neither the torrential rain that welcomed it nor the cold weather that followed the rain could deter the fair-hungry crowds. They came in thousands and forced the fair officials to hold the fair over for an additional day to satisfy the demand.
In the fairs that followed, attendance and enthusiasm increased — but so did expenses. The heavy expense of horse racing was accepted as a necessary evil but in 1911 car races had to be added. A Buick went three miles with a Ford and won. Balloons had always been a staple in the fairs of the past; now the aeroplane had to be added in 1912. Officials admitted that the new addition was expensive — it cost $900 — but they contended that it held the deficit to only $600. In 1914 raising admissions from 35¢ to 50¢ lowered the attendance without increasing the receipts. Finally, in 1916, for the first time in the seven year history of the new fair, and probably for the first time in the entire history of Door County fairs, the fair could not only claim to be out of debt but in the possession of a surplus as well.
But 1916 was only a temporary and not a permanent condition.
Despite the growing prosperity that the early 1920’s brought to the county, the financial condition of the fair grew worse. Early fairs had been held the first week in October. The new fair had started in late Sept. and gradually moved up to mid-September. In 1924, in a desperate effort to avoid bad weather, fair days were advanced a month to mid-August, only to run into equally bad weather and a conflict with a late cherry harvest. It was the last straw. For three years there were no more fairs.
Ben Rusey, the new county agent, tried his hand at fairs by staging a Junior Fair in the city school building in 1926. In 1927 he demonstrated his promotional prowess by reviving the county fair and turning it into an outstanding success. Throughout the lean years of the Depression he kept the fair going and growing, one of the county’s few bright spots of achievement.
In 1937 Rusey was ably succeeded by John Miles who, through the years that followed, down to the present time, has so thoroughly identified himself with his beloved fair that he has become “Mr. Door County Fair” in person to several generations of his fans.
Since the revival of the fair in 1928 it has gone on year after year with only two exceptions and then because of events in no way reflecting on its management. In 1942, after a splendidly staged “Victory Fair,” it became a victim of World War II and its gates were closed for three years. But it reopened in 1946, bigger and better, with an enlarged midway and blacktopped roads, hosting an estimated 20,000 spectators. The only time since then that it has been forced to close its gates was to a polio epidemic in 1956.
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Articles by Stanley Greene
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Articles about the Door County Fair
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