High Summer at the County Fair
Ask yourself: have you really, truly lived until you’ve watched small children chase an oiled piglet around for a roaring crowd? In my case, the answer was no. Turns out, a greased pig contest is far more entertaining than I ever would have expected. It was a hot July evening, and the fairgrounds smelled of hay, barnyard animals, and sweat. But the heat of the day fell away in front of the shoulder-to-shoulder audience. A corn dog in one hand, a milkshake in the other, I joined in the cheers as a pack of four-year-olds were easily bamboozled by the swift little pig. The mood was infectious and the piglet’s winning streak unbroken. Altogether, it was a night of good, old-fashioned entertainment at Maryland’s Kent County Fair.
County Fairs are a longtime tradition on the deeply rural Eastern Shore, and still mark a major milestone of any summer. Late July means fair season. Whether you’re a 4-H member, a quilter, a home gardener, a farmer, or a baker, it also represents a chance to show your community what you’ve got—and hopefully win a ribbon or two and some bragging rights for your efforts.
Every year, my local Kent County Fair is hosted over three days at an old missile base not far from the tall bayfront bluffs of Tolchester Beach. There’s a small carnival with rides and games, livestock and pet shows, an antique tractor pull, cake auctions, a themed baby contest, and of course, the greased pig contest. Deeply traditional, family-friendly and farming-forward, it never fails to draw a crowd.
There’s a multi-generational symmetry to the event, in the exhibits and in the participants. Old timers admiring each other’s tractors were once the kids proudly leading their home-raised calf or pig into a pen for showing. Both prize-winning hens and the blue ribbon eggs they laid are on display. Proud parents show off their fat cheeked babies, decked out in fussy themed outfits for the baby contest. At the County Fair, everyone is welcome and all have the chance to enter, compete and win.
This kind of showmanship is as fundamental to the human experience as breathing. As long as we have had domesticated plants and animals, we have strived for the biggest, the best, the most fruitful and abundant. The pride of careful cultivation, often such a private endeavor watered with toil, sweat and tears, becomes a public and pleasurable display at a Fair. Today’s fairs are descendants of ancient market fairs, where vendors were paid in profit rather than pride. Indeed, a stroll through the livestock exhibits shows plenty of the prize-winning steers or milk cows have “sold” stickers below the descriptions on the doors of their stalls. Though pageantry comes first at a contemporary County Fair, the old traditional whisper of commerce is still alive and well.
In our modern era of throwback homesteads and revived farmer’s markets, a trip to the County Fair is also a reminder that for some folks, raising your own produce and crafting your own home goods never went out of style. It was always cool here to grow your own peaches and can them in jars for the winter or sew scraps of faded clothes into a beautiful new quilt. And these traditional skills are being passed down, too. Even teenagers, eternally the barometers of all trends, get in on the action without a scrap of irony. Gaggles of middle and high school 4-H members are in there with the best of them, baking and exhibiting elaborate and delicious pies, raising lop-eared bunnies, or showing off the shirt they sewed by hand.
The County Fair isn’t just for the industrious. Gluttons and the indolent are welcome too, especially at the food stalls or in the bright lights of the carnival fairway. Our Kent County Fair is known for its excellent, home-cooked food, and the lines and competition get especially fierce every year on crab cake night. If you get peckish while you wait for your deep-fried, golden crab cake, you can always take the edge off with something else sinful and delicious: corn dogs, funnel cakes, technicolor snowcones, caramel apples.
Most of this food is portable, served on a stick or in a paper toot, which is handy when you head over to the carnival games. Even this part of the Fair has the distinctive whiff of the past. From the Ferris wheel to the strongman high striker games, the plush toy prizes to the funhouse mirror, not much has changed here in the last century but the music playlists. Nobody seems to mind that the fun is old-fashioned, though. Kids with snowcone-stained mouths beg for more rides on the carousel and high school couples hold hands and share cotton candy. It’s a fine summer evening and some things, like the carnival fairway at a County Fair, are perfectly timeless for good reason.
The County fair only lasts three short days and nights, but these summer celebrations of the abundance of life and growth cast long, glad shadows. It’s the reason county fairs have been memorialized in stage productions and films so often. They are a charming slice of our rural tradition carried forward, as classic Americana as apple pie. And if the lattice-topped prize winner over in the baked goods competition is anything to go on, the County Fair’s recipe is one best handed down from generation to generation without too many changes. A sweet celebration of place, seasonality, hard work, handicraft and our deep farming roots, it is pretty much perfect the way it is.
2022 Delmarva State and County Fairs
Delaware State Fair July 21-30, Harrington
Maryland State Fair August 25-September 11, Timonium
The State Fair of Virginia September 24-October 3, Doswell
Caroline-Dorchester County Fair August 3-6, Denton, Maryland
Kent County Fair July 21-23, Chestertown, Maryland
Queen Anne’s County Fair August 8-13, Centreville, Maryland
Somerset County Fair July 30, Princess Anne, Maryland
Wicomico County Fair August 19-21, Salisbury, Maryland
Worcester County Fair September 16-18, Snow Hill, Maryland
