The Rathdrum tribune. (Rathdrum, Idaho) 1903-1963, 1917-01-05
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 All
Peoples and In Every Cline.
The county fair is an institution as
old as India and as new as today. If
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 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 it's 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
sheep shaggier. The farm machinery
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 1.-THE Abyssinian marvel"
In the midst of all this excitement it
suddenly dawnS on one that the hui
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 commodi-
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 a
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 house of wor-
ship.
In medieval Europe the king grant
ed to the abbots, bishops and other
ecclesiastical dignitaries the right to
manage the fairs and to exact tolls
from the trade, which amounted to a
temporary monopoly. When the bish-
op of Winchester held his fair in Eng
land, for example, everybody else was
obliged to shut up shop and trade at
the fair. This "holy day. association
remains in the German word for fair,
,, "messe" and in the Brittany word
"kirmiss," or Church mass"
No one seems TO know whether PEG.
pie first came together to worship and
then decided to trade or whether they
came together to trade and then de-
cided to worship.
The great medieval fairs We're swept
away in the eighteenth century-in
France by the revolution, which abol-
ished such ecclesiastical monopolies,
while in England the fairs We're abol-
ished by an odd combination of good
roads and bad morals The good roads
made intercommunication easier, and
the low moral tone Of the fairs brought
them into disrepute.
| Yet the fair is mirror OF the society
| which produces it. Compare the Olym-
pic games with a county fair The
chariot race becomes the trotting race,
the rhapsodist chanting the Homeric
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
stately dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles
| and Euripides become the midway
sideshows of "Glimpses in the Ha-
rem"
| But we can do better than that. The
germ cell of the modern city is the
fair. When John Bunyan resolved to
pillory British society in "Pilgrim's
Progress he invented "Vanity Fair"
More than century later, when
Thackeray tackled the same job in
one of the greatest of English novels,
he borrowed that title from Bunyan.
| Literature abounds in fairs. The op-
era without a "kirmiss'' scene is only
half an opera. The reason is that the
fair is miniature of human society
it is to the great city as potted plant
Is to tree.
So We have our food fairs, trade
fairs and every few years our world
fairs. Fairs In one form or another
human society will continue to have
for the simple reason that from the
holy fairs of India to the-county fair
of the United States the fair Is human