Elkanah Watson had two sheep and a theory.
The sheep were Merinos, freshly imported from Spain, prized for wool so fine it was nature’s standard. Watson had retired to a farm outside Pittsfield, Massachusetts after a career as a banker, the kind of man who couldn’t simply own two nice sheep without also wondering what else he could do with them.
His theory was that people like looking at things. Not a complicated theory. Watson decided to test it anyway.
He walked his two sheep into the town square, tied them to the old elm tree standing in the middle of it, and waited to see what would happen.
What happened was a crowd. People stopped. People stared. People asked questions about wool that Watson was more than happy to answer.
He would later write down his own reaction to the whole experiment, and it’s the kind of sentence that deserves to survive intact:
“I reasoned thus, if two animals are capable of exciting so much attention, what would be the effect of a display on a larger scale of different animals.”
That’s the entire American fair, in one sentence, arrived at completely by accident. A man tied two sheep to a tree to sell wool, and it turned out he’d stumbled onto something people would still be doing two centuries later, minus the sheep tied to a tree, and plus a great deal of fried food.
A quick note before Watson goes any further: York, Pennsylvania will tell you, correctly, that its own fair predates his by four decades, chartered all the way back in 1765 by Thomas Penn himself, eleven years before the country existed to found anything.
York’s claim to “America’s Oldest Fair” is real, and it deserves the credit. What York had in 1765 was a market, a scheduled gathering to buy, sell, and trade goods.
What Watson built four decades later was something different: a contest, with premiums and judges and a ribbon on the line. York got there first. Watson invented the version everyone still competes in.
Watson wasn’t finished. He’d found something worth building on, and he had every intention of building on it.
Watson Builds an Institution
A crowd gathered for two sheep tied to a tree is a promising sign. It is not, on its own, an institution. Watson understood the difference and set out to close the gap.
In October 1810, he organized something a little more ambitious: an actual public cattle show, held on the same square where the sheep had drawn their crowd three years earlier.
Farmers from across the Berkshires showed up with their best animals, and Watson got exactly the kind of turnout he’d been hoping for. Word of the sheep hadn’t been a fluke.
That winter, Watson formalized the whole operation. He founded the Berkshire Agricultural Society, chartered by the Massachusetts legislature, built specifically to organize something bigger than a one-afternoon show.
By October 1811, the Society staged its first full agricultural fair: livestock competitions, premiums for the best animals and produce, plowing matches, and speeches to a crowd large enough that Watson allowed himself a little pride in describing it.
He called it as splendid, novel, and imposing as anything ever exhibited in America, which is the kind of claim a man only gets to make once, and Watson made sure to make it.
The formula he landed on has barely changed since. Competition, spectacle, and a community with a reason to show up together, all built around the simple fact that farmers had always wanted to know whose bull was better and finally had a formal, ribbon-based way to settle the argument.
Watson had turned a marketing stunt into a system. Other towns took notice, and the system started spreading.
The Idea Spreads
Watson’s format didn’t stay in the Berkshires for long.
Other agricultural societies across New England started copying it almost immediately, and by the 1820s and 1830s, county fairs were popping up across the Northeast on Watson’s exact blueprint: livestock judging, produce competitions, and a crowd that showed up as much for the spectacle as the agriculture.
The idea graduated to statewide scale in 1841, when New York held the first official state fair in Syracuse. Fifteen thousand people showed up over two days, which was an enormous crowd for the era, and organizers took it as proof that the concept could scale well past a single county.
Other states followed within a decade, each one building its own fair on the same basic Watson framework, then immediately looking for ways to make it bigger.
That search for bigger didn’t take long to get creative. By the late 1800s, fairs had started adding hot-air balloon ascensions as a headline attraction, with parachutists occasionally jumping out of the balloons for an audience that had come expecting cattle judging and gotten a man falling out of the sky as a bonus.
When the automobile arrived a few years later, fairs added car racing almost as fast as cars themselves existed, apparently reasoning that if a crowd would gather for a good bull, it would gather for speed too.
None of this displaced the agriculture. It just meant the agriculture now had to share a schedule with a man jumping out of a balloon, and somehow both attractions kept drawing crowds side by side.
Watson’s original insight held: people like looking at things, and it turns out there’s no real ceiling on what those things can be.
The Food Wars
Somewhere along the way, fairs stopped being just a place to look at things and became a place to eat things, and the food turned out to be just as competitive as the livestock.
The corn dog is the best example, mostly because nobody has ever actually settled who invented it.
Oregon concessioner George Boyington tells one version: in 1939, rain ruined a batch of hot dog buns, and rather than lose the sale, he improvised a cornmeal batter he could fry fresh, no bun required.
He trademarked the result as the “Pronto Pup” in 1942, and it’s still a Minnesota State Fair staple under that name today.
The Texas State Fair tells a competing version, claiming its own “Corny Dog” debuted that exact same year.
Two fairs, one invention, zero agreement, and both sides have been content to let their own fairgoers decide the matter by simply eating a great many corn dogs each August.
That rivalry set the tone for everything that followed. Fairs kept competing to out-absurd each other on the food front long after the corn dog question went unresolved, and the results have gotten stranger with each passing decade.
Deep-fried butter showed up at the Iowa State Fair as a genuine menu item, not a joke, and it’s since spread to fairs willing to risk it.
Funnel cakes, cotton candy, and turkey legs the size of a forearm rounded out a lineup that seems designed less around nutrition and more around the question of what hasn’t been fried yet this year.
It’s a strange kind of arms race, one fair trying to out-weird the next, and the only real casualty has been anyone’s arteries. Everyone else walks away a winner, ideally with a napkin.
Butter as High Art
If the food wars were about excess, the butter sculptures were about ambition. Someone, at some point, looked at a stick of butter and decided it deserved to be art.
The tradition traces back to 1903, when the Ohio State Fair started sculpting butter into shapes as a way to promote the dairy industry, reasoning that nothing sells milk quite like a life-sized cow made entirely out of the stuff.
The Iowa State Fair picked up the idea in 1911, when sculptor J.K. Daniels carved the fair’s first butter cow, and Iowa never really stopped after that. The butter cow became the fair’s mascot in dairy form, refrigerated and displayed every single year since.
Nobody carried that tradition further than Norma “Duffy” Lyon, who spent more than 40 years as Iowa’s official butter sculptor and earned herself the entirely appropriate nickname the Butter Cow Lady.
Lyon didn’t limit herself to cows. Over her career she sculpted Garth Brooks, Tiger Woods, and a rotating cast of other subjects out of refrigerated dairy, good enough to land her an appearance on The Tonight Show explaining her craft to an audience that had, until that moment, never considered butter a legitimate artistic medium.
The tradition is still going strong elsewhere too.
At the New York State Fair, husband-and-wife sculptors Jim Victor and Marie Pelton have built their own 17-year run out of an annual 800-pound block of butter, guarding their subject as a closely held secret until unveiling day, the same way a magician protects a trick nobody’s actually trying that hard to steal.
It’s an odd art form by any reasonable standard. It requires real skill, a walk-in cooler, and complete indifference to the fact that your finished masterpiece will eventually be recycled into fuel for somebody’s farm generator.
Somehow, it works. A butter cow draws a bigger crowd than most actual cows ever have.
The Lifers
Livestock and butter get you the spectacle. The jam-and-jelly tent is where you find the real stakes.
Linda Skeens has been competing at the Virginia-Kentucky District Fair for more than 50 years, and in the last decade alone she’s brought home over 450 ribbons, a pace that would exhaust a less determined woman.
She went viral for it, landed a spot on the Today show, and used the appearance to explain her blue-ribbon fudge, her strawberry jam, and her chow chow, a pickled relish she recommends putting on a hot dog without a trace of irony.
Asked whether she has a competitive streak, Skeens didn’t hesitate: she does, and she’ll cite her Saturday-night Spades game as supporting evidence. She plays to win.
She bakes to win too, and the fudge, she insists, gets its edge from a secret ingredient she calls love, delivered with the confidence of a woman who knows the judges will taste it either way.
Marjorie Johnson started entering the Minnesota State Fair in 1974 and never really stopped. Over the following five decades she collected more than 3,000 ribbons, becoming the oldest person ever to win a State Fair blue ribbon along the way.
She died late last year at 106, having won two more ribbons at the 2025 fair for her honey yeast bread and her gingersnap cookies, which means her competitive streak outlasted just about everyone else’s, including her own century.
Candy Freeman and Lois Thielen have spent nearly 30 years as Minnesota State Fair rivals and friends in equal measure, trading blue ribbons back and forth over cakes, quick breads, and international baking categories.
Thielen’s own mother competed at the same fair for 30 years before her, entering grains and sheaves with the same determination her daughter later brought to a cake pan, which means one family has now spent something like six decades chasing ribbons at the same fairground, handing the habit down the way other families hand down heirlooms.
None of these women needed the ribbon. They needed the win, which isn’t the same thing, and a fair is one of the few places left where you can chase it honestly, in public, with your own name on the entry card.
Married Rivals and Record-Breaking Vegetables
Some fair rivalries happen between strangers who’ve never met outside the judging tent. Others happen at the breakfast table.
Linda and Nick Sanders have been entering baked goods separately at the State Fair of Texas for decades, married the entire time, which makes their rivalry less a competition and more a very long-running inside joke with real stakes attached.
Nick still lights up telling the story of their first year competing together, when both of them entered the fudge category and the results came back close enough to matter: Linda took second, Nick took first, and he has clearly been enjoying that outcome ever since.
Linda, for her part, claims she’s happier watching Nick win than winning herself, which is either a genuinely lovely sentiment or the most convincing bluff in fudge history. You can decide for yourself.
The fair’s competitive streak isn’t limited to what people bake.
Alaska has built an entire reputation on giant vegetables, thanks to a growing season that pairs long summer daylight with unusually rich soil, and grower Scott Robb has turned that combination into a personal specialty.
He holds Guinness World Records for the heaviest turnip ever grown, at just over 39 pounds, the heaviest kale, at nearly 106 pounds, and the heaviest green cabbage, at 138 pounds.
A cabbage that size is heavier than most pieces of furniture, and Robb grew three separate record holders, in three separate categories, at the same state fair.
Whatever the category, the instinct is identical: find the thing you’re good at, then get better at it than anyone else in the state, one growing season or one fudge batch at a time.
And It Still Works
Two centuries after Elkanah Watson tied two sheep to a tree, the instinct he stumbled onto hasn’t faded even a little.
People still like looking at things, and it turns out they’ll compete for a piece of colored ribbon with a seriousness that would be baffling if you hadn’t seen it happen in person.
That’s really the whole secret. A fair doesn’t need to be enormous to work. It needs a butter sculptor willing to guard a secret for eleven months, a fifty-year veteran of the jam tent with a chow chow recipe nobody else can touch, a married couple keeping score over fudge, and a grower somewhere convinced this is finally the year his cabbage breaks a record.
Every one of those people started out the same way Watson did: certain that something they’d built was worth showing off, and curious enough to find out if anyone else agreed.
Your own county or state fair almost certainly has its own version of Linda Skeens, some quiet fixture of the baking tent who’s been winning ribbons since before you were born and has a story behind every jar on the table.
It has its own butter sculpture, or at least its own answer to one, some local specialty nobody outside the county has ever heard of but everybody inside it lines up for anyway.
It has its own rivalry humming along in the background, two neighbors or two cousins who’ve been trying to out-grow, out-bake, or out-raise each other for longer than either of them will admit.
Go find it. Walk the midway, eat something that’s been fried well past the point anyone asked it to be, and stop by the exhibit hall long enough to read a few of the ribbon cards.
Somewhere in there is a person who’s been quietly winning at this since long before you ever thought to ask, and their whole life’s work is sitting on a folding table, waiting for you to notice it the way that Pittsfield crowd noticed two sheep in 1807.
It worked then. It still works now.
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