The recent Nutmeg Festival is Ridgefield’s oldest annual “fair.” Was it the town’s first fair?
The Ridgefield Fair and Cattle Show, sponsored by the Ridgefield Agricultural Society, was probably the first. Begun in 1858, it lasted until 1881.
The first fairgrounds — then for a one-day event — was on Gilbert Street. As the affair grew in popularity and size, it was moved to what’s now Veterans Park. Finally it found permanent home at the “Fair Grounds” east of Wilton Road West, opposite Olmstead Lane. By then, it was four days —Tuesday through Friday—and large enough so that, one year, 112 yoke of oxen were exhibited.
Staged in late September or early October, this typical country fair offered exhibits of products, produce and livestock, plus music, food, and awards. An old awards list contains 31 categories for ribbons, including field crops, grains, grass seed, vegetables, fruit, floriculture, bread, dairy, honey, preserved fruit, pickles, cakes, wines, “ladies’ industrials,” fine arts, musical instruments, domestic products, farming utensils, poultry, sheep, swine, oxen, milch cows and heifers, fatted cattle, stallions, colts, family horses, and road horses.
A very early “automobile” was exhibited in the 1870s by a Stamford man named Simon Ingersoll. “The automobile may be described as being a large box set on small wheels, narrow gauge, and steam was the motive power,” historian George Rockwell reported. “The machine was driven up and down Main Street, exciting much curiosity and wonder. At the Fair Grounds, it was speeded around the track.”
The track was a race course for trotters who competed at the fair. Remnants of the track were visible well into the 1950s.
While such fairs were fun, they also functioned as agricultural “conventions.” Farmers got to see the latest products — mid-19th Century agricultural markets were booming with new machines, tools and seed varieties. Farmers could hear lectures on improved farming techniques. They also got to chat with a wider group of farmers, and could discuss and critique some of the modern-day advances. At a fair, “they saw, gathered up in a small compass, what was going on in the farmer’s world, and this within a single day or two,” said an 1860s book on farming. “Thus, they accumulated a fund of knowledge which they could not have acquired had they remained at home.”
The fair ceased operation in 1881, possibly due to competition from the Danbury Fair (which operated for more than a century where the mall of the same name now stands). The fairgrounds had included a sizable exhibition building, which was dismantled. True to the Yankee spirit of not wasting, the lumber from the building was used to build the Sperry livery stable, which stood across from the firehouse on Catoonah Street until collapsing after a snowstorm in 1948.
The Fair Grounds was actually a historic site. It had been the location of the British overnight encampment after the Battle of Ridgefield in 1777. Today, the land is occupied by homes on Wilton Road West and Soundview Road. —J.S.