106 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



have stuck to the right theory of conducting a fair. It is a wonderful in- 

 stitution, and your county and district fairs are equally successful — I have 

 just been reading the reports of them — so that I do not have the monu- 

 mental nerve of attempting to teach you how to run a fair, but rather come 

 here to learn. 



Nineteen years ago this winter, having just fairly begun the breeding 

 of Shorthorn cattle on my farm near Hutchinson, Kansas, I felt the need 

 of a fair, and I began interesting some of the more influential men of my 

 town and community, as well as thruout the Arkansas valley, in the possi- 

 bilities of such an institution, with the hope of organizing a fair. That is 

 how I happened to get into it. I was elected president of the fair — I little 

 dreamed I would some day be a fair manager myself — and it devolved upon 

 me two years later to either accept the management of the fair or let it 

 go by the board, and I took the job and have been at it ever since. We 

 began in a modest way. I said to my folks that a country that was good 

 enough to live in was good enough to invest money in; and a town that 

 was good enough to run a fair was good enough to own some ground in 

 which to conduct the fair, so on that theory we bought 52 acres of ground 

 in the north part of town (at that time the city being about 8,500 popula- 

 tion) — we bought it for $5,000.00. Later, I believe it was nine years later, 

 we sold that ground for $87,000.00 and moved our equipment to the ground 

 just north, which is now the state fair grounds. The fair, of course, has 

 been a success. The city has grown since that time from 8,500 to 26,000, 

 and in the ten-year period following, that congressional district, comprising 

 southwestern Kansas made 50% of the entire growth in population the 

 state of Kansas made during that period. A number of the more im- 

 portant business men of southwestern Kansas have said that the influence 

 of the fair had more to do with the growth of central and western Kansas 

 in population than any other institution in the state. I only cite 

 this as an incident, which you have all probably experienced, that a fair 

 develops the country in which it is located. 



The state fair has developed Iowa. Your county fairs have developed 

 your localities. Our county is the premier agricultural county in the 

 state. We are first in silos, first in cream separators and first in tractors. 

 Reno county and the counties adjoining it in a single year raised as much 

 as 32-million bushels of wheat, besides large herds of cattle, a great many 

 hogs, large yields of alfalfa, etc. The fair is a natural developer and I don't 

 know of any instance in the country where it is more significant than right 

 in my own locality, as to what a fair will do for its community. 



Since I got into the fair game I have made a study of it and the more 

 I have studied it the more interesting it becomes. Centuries ago, as one 

 reads history, there were fairs. There were fairs in Italy, fairs in Greece, 

 fairs in Russia, and many other places. Those fairs were simply business 

 concerns and it is from that that "The Fair," an institution in Chicago, 

 and similar merchandising concerns elsewhere have taken the name of 

 "The Fair." That is where they got the idea. 



About 150 years ago in the valley of the Tees in northeast England they 

 began the real thing, which was the bringing out of their steers for com- 

 parison. They began in a very crude way, as many other things have 



