Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on March 26, 1991.
They’ve come for fun and prizes since 1851
by William Thompson
The Vidette-Messenger
Fair Fun?
Through the years, 140 of them to be exact, the Porter County Fair has afforded county residents, and others from all over the area, the opportunity to view some of the most unusual and popular acts around. For example, Johnny Rivers’ World’s Only High Diving Mules once amazed fairgoers, as shown above in this photo, provided by former Fair Board vice-president John Poncher of Valparaiso. But he wasn’t sure just when they appeared.
The Porter County Fair will celebrate its 150th anniversary in the year 2001.
Carl Hefner, the summer festival’s longest-serving president, has had a long love affair with fairs, and he traces the evolution of the local event not in cold facts, but in memories.
Former Vidette-Messenger reporter Nancy Shurr recalls the early history of the fair:
The idea for the fair was conceived on June 14, 1851, at a meeting to organize an Agriculture Society and attended by prominent local citizens. The Porter County Fair became a one-day event on the courthouse lawn in Valparaiso.
It was attended by about 400 people and presented $80 in prizes for horses, cattle, sheep, swine, fruits and vegetables, dairy products and farm equipment.
Following this success, a second fair was held October 14-15, 1852, with prize money increased to $100 and more categories added. By 1853 there was $300 in prize money and competition in butter, cheese, bed quilting and rug carpeting was added.
The fair was held on the courthouse square until 1859, when it moved to the old woolen mill grounds, west of the former Anderson Co. building. This site was used until 1862, when the fair was suspended due to the Civil War.
The fair did not reappear in Porter County until 1871, when the Agricultural Society was reorganized under the leadership of president A.V. Bartholomew. The fair was held in October of that year.
In July 1872, a 20-acre plot north of the Grand Trunk Railroad and just east of state Route 49 was bought by the society from Nathan A. Kennedy for $2,500. A fence was built around the grounds; buildings and stalls were erected; and the first fair was held on this site in 1872.
The parcel was later increased by acquiring nine acres from William Riggs in 1890 and the Old Fairgrounds was created, Shurr said. And it served its purpose will late into the 20th Century.
Because of the Depression, the 1931 fair went broke, and was the last held as a major event for a number of years, Hefner said.
The handsome gentleman at above is Golden Moose Cholak, a big name in professional wrestling in the 1950s and ‘60s. He also performed at the fair, sometime in the early 1960s, when he was the World Champion, according to the belt buckle.
In 1932, it became a two-day event with no entertainment; after that, it was run strictly as a 4-H show until 1943, when the Fair Board was resurrected and reorganized, thanks mostly to a man named John Avala Jones (who was a former treasurer of the Ringling Brothers Circus).
Jones brought the fair back to a five-day schedule.
By 1954, the fair had grown to a six-day affair ー with carnivals and entertainment booked once again. It was during this renaissance that Hefner took an interest in the fair.
He first became involved in 1948, assisting with the hog and swine departments. He happily worked this department until 1956, when he was elected to serve as Fair Board president, replacing Walter Hanrahan, who had served for 14 years. Hefner held the board’s top spot until 1989.
“The Porter County Fair is not a one-man show ー it’s an effort put together by an awful lot of people and I want to stress that,” Hefner said.
“I don’t know why I originally joined. I just love fairs; I never thought then that the fair would get to be the size it is now. I guess you’d say you like to work with people when you work with fairs.”
By the mid-60s, the Fair Board saw the need for more acreage, but city zoning regulations stifled expansion
“Obstructions were put in front of it (one old fairgrounds), so that the county commissioners couldn’t develop it much more,” Hefner recalls.
After years of haggling and in-fighting between the governmental bodies in the ‘70s, the Fair Board was finally able to move into the new Porter County Fairgrounds and Exposition Center in Washington Township in 1985.
The move allowed the fair an expansion from 29 to 80 acres, and it is held there to this day.
Managing the fair has never been easy for Hefner, a Pleasant Township farmer.
His most time-consuming responsibility is supervising all the department heads and coordinating their activities.
Filling empty positions, signing food contracts and booking the entertainment is a year round job.
And the fair is not without its share of bad luck. Though Hefner fails to recall exactly when they happened, he tells of four tragedies.
In the early ‘60s, a commercial exhibition tent caught fire due to an electrical shortage. No one was killed or injured.
In a freak accident once, a carnival employee had a gun go off when it fell from his pocket. The bullet ricocheted off of a carnival ride bar he was cleaning, and came back to kill him. Police took over the fair office that day, Hefner recalls.
Another time a carnival employee died of a heart attack under a truck as he was taking refuge from a rainstorm.
Another incident occurred in which a man fatally fell from a double ferris wheel, Hefner said.
But tragedies like these have not kept people away from rides, attractions and rural unity.
The biblical command ー “Thou shalt not judge…” ー certainly never applied to the county fair. It is a festival bent on judging everything, be it human, animal, vegetable or mineral.
Porter County Fair queens have learned grace over the years; a few have gone on to win state fair competition. Diane Lynn Martin, 1981 Miss Porter County Fair went on to participate in the Miss America Pageant as Miss Arizona, and later went on to marry a popular rock star, Hefner said.