232 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



The county fairs down there are very prosperous — very pros- 

 perous. The savings banks in Massachusetts and Vermont and 

 the other New England states are fairly bulging with money, and 

 most of that money is loaned to men out here to carry out your 

 farming operations here. And mostly western farm mortgages are 

 held by those people. 



The present organization that I am associated with is probably 

 unique in that it is unlike any other organization of its character 

 in the country. There are no state fairs or municipal fairs — that 

 is, big municipal or large interstate fairs like in Canada, which is 

 owned and operated by the cities, like the Texas state fair, whose 

 grounds are owned by the city and operated by the organization. 

 There is nothing down there of that kind, except the state of Ver- 

 mont, where they have a state fair, and they have a state fair in 

 Connecticut; but there are 93 county fairs in the state of Iowa 

 whose fairs are more comprehensive in exhibits and larger in at- 

 tendance than the Connecticut state fair at BerHn. The group of 

 men that organized and got behind this institution with which I 

 am connected are all large manufacturers. They are men who have 

 a vision; they are men who do things in a big way, and who are 

 very prominent in industry down there, and who feel the high cost 

 of living of their employes and the necessarily hard conditions it 

 makes, places a handicap upon them as compared with their com- 

 petitors further west, and they believe, and I think they have the 

 right to have the true vision of it, that food production can be 

 greatly stimulated in that section. I believe it is largely a matter, 

 as I said to them, of New England going broke running truck farms 

 and cherry farms. I don't mean that we have lots of dairy cattle 

 down there, but we should have more dairy cattle, but any man that 

 starts out with a dairy herd and milks his cows and sells milk with- 

 out raising the larger proportion of his feed, is two laps ahead of 

 the sheriff when he starts, and whether he is in Massachusetts or in 

 Iowa it makes no difference. So these men formed themselves 

 into an organization called the Eastern States Exposition and dug 

 down in their pockets and got together one-million dollars to build 

 a plant. They have about 173 acres of land, and aside from that 

 they have about $600,000 in buildings, and the National Dairy 

 Show was held there in 1916. I went there in 1917 and held our 

 first show. The government took our property in 1918 and used 

 us as a storage warehouse until the conclusion of the war, and our 

 second show was held this year. A fair as we understand it out 



