The Albemarle County Fair will return this year, Hawes Spencer writes in The Hook. It will be held at Ash Lawn, temporarily, as they continue to seek out a permanent location. Ash Lawn not being an ideal venue, the 2012 fair will be brought back to its agricultural roots—just three days long, daylight hours only, focusing on livestock, contests, and entertainment, with no rides and less vendors.
Organizers of the event had to cancel the annual event last year, since their long-time borrowed location of Bundoran Farm had been turned into a vineyard. (A small, brief, purely agricultural event was held at a private farm, so that all the 4-H kids would be able to show and auction the livestock they’d been raising for the occasion.) It’s a shame that the Biscuit Run land swap wasn’t able to include some land to establish permanent fairgrounds.
Is there any hope that if they get enough positive response to this year’s version, they’ll decide to keep the fair permanently carnival-free? (Or am in in the minority as someone who thinks this would be a good thing?)
I don’t personally object to the carnival aspect (I quite like it, in fact), but I think that the agriculture/carnival ratio has been off. Fair organizers did a better job in 2010, providing more ag aspects liable to interest to the sorts of folks who aspire to keep chickens at home, enjoy gardening, do a little canning, etc. I was hopeful that they’d expand on that in 2011, and this new, narrowed focus makes me more optimistic still for 2012.
Would a shift like that be a change you’d like?
Producing our sausage and hominy
Requires that we study agronomy.
So, let’s have a fair,
To foster it there;
It may even boost the economy.
Anyone know the story behind the State Fair of Va. shutting down? It seems to me they got kicked out of the old fair grounds (Richmond Speedway) in some kind of land deal and ended up out in new Kent County, but it seems it was actually near Kings’s Dominion? Anyway it’s Chapter 7, yet its Strawberry Fields – a which used to be a big event in Richmond – goes on at Colonial Downs? I suspect Nascar or some greediness. Or is it incompetence? Or is there just a Sate/County fair problem generally? People go to these things, do the organizers just overspend trying to draw the big crowds? Or is the Japanese Yakuza taking a cut and running it into the ground? Or is it greedy real estate barons? Sometimes I think we are going into some weird sci-fi version of the nineteenth century where malevolent forces own the means of production. And festivity!
@ colfer
Seems for years both (either) the Virginia State Fairgrounds and/or Richmond Speedway have underwent change, like shells in some gambling game scam. Oh and yes, this will date me – Strawberry Hill.
As far as the Richmond Speedway, the talk going around is just as dicey as suspecting “NASCAR or some greediness.” In a different item seemingly unrelated, the Old Dominion Speedway of Manassas is increasingly looking to move elswhere. The speculation behind that is eyeing a possible new place along the I-95 corridor somewhere from Richmond to Stafford County. If a deal lands such closer to Richmond, a potential could try to consolidate (hint) seperate functions. For the time being though, all this is no more than speculation.
As far as the Albemarle County Fair, did anybody ever suggest the old animal stockyard near the RWSA’s Moores Creek Facility (southeast) near the city limits? Okay, that there wasn’t such a novel thought afterall, sorry!
If area fairs are having financial woes due to weather or rising expenses, maybe some of them ought to consider consolidation.