The Washburn times. [volume] (Washburn, Wis.) 1896-1976, 1916-12-14
OUR COUNTY FAIRS
Their Origin Traced to Habits of
Primitive Man.
BORN IN THE DAYS OF BARTER.
These Exhibitions, Typical of Their
Times, Ever New, Yet as Old as In
dia, Have Been Popular Among Al
Peoples and In Every Cline.


Peoples and In Every Cline.
The county fair is an institution as
old as India and as new as today. Ii
anybody supposes that manufacturing
has dulled the rustic flavor of the New
England fair'let him go to New Eng
land fair and learn his mistake.
The fair grounds are thronged with
the characters of a rural drama multi
piled by 5000. They have come in
every vehicle from touring car to dem
ocrat wagon-the whole family. from
dim eyed grandmother to bright eyed
baby. The old folks are engrossed in
prize stock, the young folks in one an
other. Any one who cannot see hun
dred country courtships at a county
fair must be blind.
Did any one suppose the fair had
lost the luster of its pristine glory!
all wrong. 1t is bigger and better
than ever. The cows are sleeker, the
bulls more Romanly majestic, the stall
lions prouder, the hogs fatter, the
grows more intricate and fascinating.
The motorcar does not seem to have
robbed horse racing Of its thrills any
more than the human race seems to
tire of plugging baseballs at the kinky
skull Of "the Abyssinian marvel"
In the midst Of all this excitement 1t
suddenly dawns on one that the hu-
man race never tires Of fairs. They
are as old as human society. The fair
| is the place where primitive man came
to swap wheat for furs, dried dates
| for woven cloth. The fair Is the bios
som of a commercial society. 1t Is
| the bartering place between men who
produce different sorts of commod1-
ties. In Russia the huge fairs are the
big business days Of the year. In
parts of northern Asia the fair Is the
only market.
Oddly enough, religion and commerce
| have always gone hand In hand at
the fair. The Olympic games of an
| cient Greece were almost as much
| commercial as a religious event In
ancient Italy the annual assembly at
| the temple of Voltumna was as much
| fair as feast. The temple Of Jerusa-
| lem itself on one occasion proved to
have become almost as much a place
Of barter and sale as a house of wor
ship.
In medieval Europe the king grant
ed to the abbOts, bishops and othei
| 10 nj 10
manage the fairs and to exact tolls
| from the trade, which amounted to
| temporary monopoly. When the bisl
| Cd of Winchester held his fair in Eng
land, for example, everybody else wa
| obliged to shut up shop and trade a.
the fair. This "holy day" association
remains in the German word for fair
"messe' and in the Brittany wore
"kirmiss," or "church mass"
| No one seems to know whether PEG
pie first came together to worship an(
| then decided to trade or whether they
came together to trade and then de
cided to worship.
| The great medieval fairs were swep
away in the eighteenth century-i
France by the revolution, which abol
ished such ecclesiastical monopolies
while in England the fairs were abol
ished by an odd combination of gooC
roads and bad morals. The good road
made intercommunication easier, anc
| the low moral tone OF the fairs brOugh
them into disrepute.
| Yet the fair is mirror of the soriet,
which produces it. Compare the Olym
pic games with a county fair. The
chariot race becomes the trotting race
the rhapsodist chanting the Homeri'
poems becomes the barker bawling the
ballyhoo; the statues of Phidias be
come the exhibition Of fancy needle
work; the rite of human sacrifice (sup
posing there is one) becomes the bal
loon ascension and parachute jump or
the aviator looping the loop and the