Last year, 238,000 people streamed through the gates of Meadow Event Park during the State Fair in search of fried food, Virginia’s finest in livestock and produce, or perhaps an elusive victory on the ring-toss.
But before the melting, sugary rush of a fried Oreo could hit their tongues or those rings so tantalizingly extended by carnies could induce a wave of existential despair (How does hope always spring anew when it is ever frustrated?), they had to get directions. Before city slickers from Richmond or Norfolk could distinguish between rows of crops, or old-timers could identify what the heck a bok choy is, they had to have their questions answered by a knowledgeable man or woman in a blue apron.
Though these fairgoers may not have known it, the odds are good that the people who came to their aid were from Caroline.
This year, of the 67 volunteers who worked the State Fair from Sept. 25 through its abrupt early closure Oct. 1 in the face of the looming Hurricane Joaquin, 18 came from Caroline—27 percent of the force.
“People who know nothing about Caroline and come to the State Fair leave with a positive feeling,” Caroline volunteer Kathryn Burruss told the Progress. “It’s the best ambassador this county has.”
In fact, not only is Caroline’s footprint evident in the 331 verdant acres of Meadow Event Park that stretch east from the North Anna River toward Dawn and are home to the modern State Fair, but its fingerprints are all over the event—if you only know where to look.
At first glance, Caroline’s impact on the Fair is obvious in the many prizewinning examples of local expertise and creativity that line the stalls, shelves and Farm Bureau Center aisles.
Some of the offerings are more traditional, such as a 1949 Farmall Cub tractor restored to blue-ribbon glory by A. B. Pitts of Woodford, a market steer raised by Caroline 4-H member Daniel Fitzgerald, or an “Apple Pie Challah Mode” created by Caroline County Agricultural Fair winner Lisa Beckwith for the Virginia Egg Council’s Come for Dessert Recipe contest. Others are inspiring examples of blossoming talent, like the virtuosic wire sculpture that won CHS student Katherine Kline a 2nd-place ribbon and an $800 scholarship.
Others still are more unexpected but no less stimulating, like Caroline Tourism Director Kathy Beard’s painted longhorn covered in Swarovski crystals, which took two to three months of intermittent work and snagged a 2nd place in adult handcrafts.
The piece, said Beard, is one of a “herd” that grew out of her long-term fascination with longhorn skulls. Until recently it hung over the bar at the Blue and Gray Brewery in Fredericksburg and is named Shimmer.
“It’s hard to divest yourself of them once they’re named,” said Beard. “Once they have a name, it’s a pet.”
While impressive, Caroline is not unusual in sending its citizens flocking to the Fair with the flowers of their agricultural and creative industry. What is unique about Caroline’s relationship to the Fair is the roots that it gives the event. It is the generous labor and agricultural commitment of its residents that keep the more than 150-year-old tradition running smoothly.
With more than a quarter of the Fair’s volunteers coming from Caroline, many have a long history with the annual celebration. Burruss has missed only one of the past 40 Fairs, and she still remembers that year ruefully. And Caroline Farm Bureau president Lynwood Broaddus, although he acknowledged that the work can be tiring, admitted, “When it’s over, you miss it.”
The most significant roles played by volunteers, said State Fair Volunteer Coordinator Kaki Upshaw, herself a local, are as greeters and guides.
“They help you figure out how to plan your day,” she said. Although Upshaw struggles to get the manpower she needs for the event, Caroline volunteers, she noted, are particularly invaluable because of their familiarity with the area and their connection to this patch of land.
One example of that connection could be found this year outside Young MacDonald’s Farm, where Broaddus, assisted by Burruss, stood every day of the Fair by the crop exhibition, made up of rows of corn, tobacco, cotton, soybeans, peanuts and sorghum.
“We wanted folks to understand what they drive past on the road,” said Burruss.
Still rooted strongly in agriculture, the State Fair of Virginia brings together produce from Tidewater to Blue Ridge, but both the field crop and the vegetable garden displays are, quite literally, homegrown.
Preparation begins in early spring, when local State Fair livestock and event manager Glenn Martin puts in the first seeds of the vegetable garden, assisted by Burruss. June sees the planting of the field crops and autumnal produce like broccoli and cabbage to ensure that the plants have reached maturity by the time the Fair opens in September. For that endeavor, Martin taps Caroline High School’s Future Farmers of America, which this year sent a half-dozen students to Meadow Event for hands-on experience.
For many urban visitors to the State Fair, these exhibitions are one of the few times they get to see agricultural products in their “natural” environment, up close and personal.
It’s an exciting experience, but some get overenthusiastic about the plants they’re being introduced to for the first time. Holding out a soybean pod, Broaddus remarked wryly, “You have to make sure they don’t try to eat it.”
This year, the greatest attention-grabber was a tall variety of sorghum, also locally known as “milo,” that to the untrained eye is easily confused with corn.
“We try to put some things in the field or garden that cause people to ask what it is,” said Burruss. “It’s an educational opportunity.”
But for Broaddus, the reason for the exhibitions is even more fundamental, tapping into the agricultural way of life that has long characterized Caroline County and that he himself cherishes.
“If we don’t do everything we can to promote it, we’ll be in trouble,” he said.
Broaddus’s concern illustrates perhaps the most unique tie between Caroline and today’s State Fair: both sit squarely at the crossroads of rural tradition and the increasingly fast pace of 21st-century Virginia.
It’s a position of which the State Fair and its owner, the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, are aware. This year’s exhibitor manual, for example, kicks off 11 pages of rules and regulations with a poignant note about “a world where Virginia’s open land and traditions that shaped our culture are rapidly vanishing,” and the Fair has clung tenaciously to its agricultural core even while adapting aspects of the event to changing tastes.
Too, in Caroline County—the last predominantly agricultural pocket between Washington, D.C., and Richmond—land use and preservation of the rural space figure large in public debates. As elections come around, the question of what the county should be in the future is on many residents’ minds.
As they move forward, though, perhaps both the Fair and Caroline can take comfort in a recent exchange at a Ruritan election event, when a declaration by a candidate for office that if all of the farms in the county were destroyed no one would notice prompted a low but persistent chorus: “We would.”
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