Monroe County's fair predates the Civil War

Monroe County was throwing agricultural fairs while the country was still arguing its way toward the Civil War. The earliest ones folks could recall were held in the 1830s and 1840s — at Noble’s Grove, at the foot of Washington Street, in a grove down near the Ohio line below Lambertville — wherever the county could find shade and open ground for a few days of prize hogs, pie judging, and horse racing.

For about a century the fair had no permanent home. It packed up and moved around, set up wherever made sense that year. That ended after World War II. In the winter of 1947 the county Board of Supervisors put up $40,000 to give the fair a permanent place, and it landed where it still sits today — the corner of South Custer and Raisinville Roads, just west of the city of Monroe. The county owns the grounds and leases them to the fair association on a long-term agreement measured in decades, not years.

What started as a one-week farm show has spread across the calendar. The week-long summer fair is still the main event — livestock barns, a midway, the grandstand — but the grounds now host shows most weekends of the year, from gun-and-knife sales to dog trials to motorsports, inside big exhibition halls and a couple-thousand-seat arena.

It’s the kind of place every farm county used to have and many no longer do: a permanent fairground that still smells like fried dough and barn straw in July, run by the same association, on land the county set aside three-quarters of a century ago and never let go.