At the first Tunbridge Fair, the main event was to see whose horse was the fastest.
That was in 1867. There have been a few changes since then, including of location. The first few fairs were held in North Tunbridge before the current fairgrounds opened in 1875.
“Things really have changed,” Alan Howe, president of the Union Agricultural Society, which operates the fair, said last week. “But they’ve stayed the same.”
Though the midway, a mid-20th-century innovation, looms large, much of the fair is still about local people showing their prize animals, vegetables, handcrafts, flowers and other products of homespun effort.
In that way, the 150th fair, which opened Thursday and concludes on Sunday, is like the first.
That first fair was held in 1867, near the Larkin Covered Bridge, where a small racetrack had been set up. For those keeping score, that’s 155 years ago. The fair was called off a few times, during the world wars (sources aren’t clear on which years), and in 2020, making this year’s the 150th.
The changes at the fair might be less dramatic than the changes in the state that surrounds it. Vermont’s rural landscape has become steadily more suburban; the number of dairy farms continues to dwindle; small, diverse farms keep popping up.
When the fair does change, it often reflects the times. In the middle of the last century, the fair had become a kind of den of iniquity, known as much for its “girlie shows” and drunkenness as for its prize heifers and giant pumpkins. Howe’s predecessor, the late Euclid Farnham, and his fellow Union Agriculture Society members, cleaned it up.
In recent years, the fair has done away with its demolition derby, for insurance reasons. And this is the last year for harness racing, the event’s original drawing card. Of course, back in 1867, every farmer had a trotting horse he wanted to test against his neighbors’.
It was at that first installment that Lt. Gov. Burnham Martin called it a “little world’s fair,” and that name was adopted the following year, in keeping with Vermont’s many-layered sense of humor. Is “World’s Fair” ironic? Defiant? Self-deprecating? Yes, and more. Tunbridge, for some, is world enough.
There’s a new building at the fairgrounds, Heritage Hall, and this year it contains an exhibition on the fair’s history, Howe said.
The recent cancellation, during the first year of the novel coronavirus pandemic, is a reminder that the fair is not a world apart and that these are momentous times. The continuities — the cattle, swine and poultry, the horse and oxen pulls, the First Branch of the White River trickling by, even the fried dough and the Ferris wheel — are comforting after the interruption in 2020. It’s happened 150 times, but the fair can’t be taken for granted.
— Alex Hanson