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Midway Directory · By type

Agricultural fairs

A fair built around farming: livestock shows, 4-H, produce and home-craft competitions, usually with a midway alongside.

An agricultural fair is a show of a district’s farming: livestock judging, 4-H, produce, baking and home crafts, usually with a midway alongside. The idea is old in North America. Windsor, Nova Scotia, dates its fair to 1765, and the American county fair grew from a cattle show in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1810.

What it is

An agricultural fair is run by an agricultural society or a fair board, usually volunteers, and it exists to show and judge what a district grows and makes: cattle, sheep, horses, poultry, vegetables, preserves, quilts and pies, each with a prize list and a ribbon. Most are a weekend or a few days in late summer or fall, on a fairground the society owns or rents.

Around the judging sits everything that brings in a crowd: a parade, a stage, a horse show or a small rodeo, food, and very often a midway. In British Columbia alone more than thirty are listed, from one-day island fairs to the big exhibitions.

History, era by era

1765
The Hants County Exhibition in Windsor, Nova Scotia, gives 1765 as its founding year and calls itself the oldest continuously run agricultural fair in North America. The Windsor Agricultural Society still owns and runs it.1
1810–1811
Elkanah Watson showed his Merino sheep in the square at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In 1810 he and his neighbours staged a cattle show, and in 1811 he organized the Berkshire Agricultural Society to hold it every year.23
1840s
In Canada West, a provincial agricultural fair moved from town to town in the 1840s, the forerunner of fixed city exhibitions such as Toronto’s.4
1880s
Fairs on the prairies mixed farming with cowboy skills. Rope-throwing contests were common at the Fort Macleod Agricultural Fair in the 1880s.5
1910
British Columbia’s fairs met in a central convention on January 31, 1910, the start of today’s BC Fairs. The province wanted fairs grouped into district circuits with matching prize lists.6
Today
Many fairs still run on the 19th-century pattern: a society, a prize book, judging in the barns, and a midway company booked for the weekend. West Coast Amusements, for one, has played BC fairs since its first contract at Port Alberni.7

The midway connection

The midway at a farm fair is the part that pays for the rest. The 1893 Chicago fair showed that rides and shows could charge on top of admission, and fairs have booked them ever since. In BC, midway companies route their summer around the fair calendar.89

Even the smallest fairs, the ones with no rides at all, have the other half of the midway: tables of crafts and home baking, a pie sale, a 4-H barbecue, local vendors under tents. That is the same promenade, at walking pace.

Wherever people walk a row of booths, the midway is there in some form: the full kind, with rides, games of skill and food joints, or the quieter kind, with craft tables, home baking and a booth like ours. That walk, with family and friends and something to look at every few steps, is what this directory is about.

One fact worth knowing

Questions people ask

What is the oldest agricultural fair in North America?

The Hants County Exhibition in Windsor, Nova Scotia, which dates itself to 1765 and describes itself as the oldest continuously run agricultural fair on the continent.1

Who started the American county fair?

Elkanah Watson of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who held a cattle show in 1810 and organized the Berkshire Agricultural Society in 1811 to hold it every year.2

Does every agricultural fair have a midway?

No. The big ones book a carnival company; small island and valley fairs often have none, and their booths are crafts, food and exhibits instead.6

Sources

  1. Hants County Exhibition (Windsor Agricultural Society): Our history. Read on · official
  2. New York State Library: Watson, Elkanah Papers. Read on · government
  3. National Conference of State Legislatures: Meet Me at the Fair. Read on · reference
  4. The Canadian Encyclopedia: Canadian National Exhibition. Read on · reference
  5. The Canadian Encyclopedia: Rodeo. Read on · reference
  6. BC Fairs: About. Read on · official
  7. BCBusiness: Carnie knowledge in Canada. Read on · news
  8. Chicago Park District: Midway Plaisance Park. Read on · government
  9. Digital Museums Canada (Community Stories): West Coast Amusements: modern carnival. Read on · reference

Short listings from the census

Checked and sourced, but without a full page yet. Each one links to its row on its province or state page.

The Midway Mailbag

New listings as they arrive. Notes on new listings.

Running a fair, a booth or a fundraiser?

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All kinds of fairs · Midway Directory

Written by The Midway Machine. Last checked 2026-10-21.

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