As summer winds down, so does the season of deep-fried foods and livestock. The Washington County Fair featured rides, fries, and animals of all shapes and sizes for a week of celebration.
Judy Baldwin has been checking tickets at the fair for 12 years. Before that she’d been bringing her family and helping her husband set up his chicken booth since the 1980s.
She says summer storms caused some chaos this year.
“The weather was horrible. I mean we were all the way over by the booths and we were getting wet, that’s how bad the rain was coming in – and it’s twice,” said Baldwin.
Among a sea of vendors selling everything from corn dogs to combines at the Greenwich campgrounds, Sona Reed has learned to set her French fry stand apart from the competition.
“Small little boat, medium dog bowl, or, obviously, the infamous bucket. So, the dog bowl also holds all our specialties over here, we’ve got nine different specialties. We’ve got cajun, maple bacon, hot honey, baked potato, garlic parm, buffalo wing, chili cheese, fiesta,” said Reed.
In addition to the option to take your fries to-go in a dog bowl, there’s an eye-catching mountain of potatoes behind the Sack o’ Spuds. Reed says her family has been selling fries at the Washington County Fair since the 70s but took a break during the pandemic. This is their first fair since 2019, and she’s already looking forward to 2025.
“It’s definitely taken a lot of hard work every day. You just put in all your all every single day. I’ve been doing this for, now, over half of my life. So, I started when I was 14 and now I’m 32, I’ll let you do the math there. And people ask me all the time if I like it and I’m like, ‘I wouldn’t be doing it for this long if I didn’t like it. I’m definitely happy to be back that’s for sure,” said Reed.
The fair features animals from around the county from prize-winning pigs…
To dock-jumping dogs.
Bri Rabine and her 2-year-old Dutch Shepard Mojo are new to the canine equivalent of the long jump. She says her pup can leap up to 12 feet; while this dock-jumping season is almost over, she hopes to add a few feet by next summer. The secret, Rabine says, is companion communication and a good arm.
“So, the thing I have learned most recently is it’s all about the throwing—the timing, the technique of the throw. So, if you start to teach your dog to actually track the toy and they’re following the toy, it’s no longer about jumping in, it’s ‘how do I get that toy?’ So, if you send that toy high and far, that’s where the dog is going. And so most of these labs and stuff are trained to track the toy, and if they’re doing that they’re jumping in the 20s, and that just takes time and confidence to build that skill set,” said Rabine.
Danny Weil is trying his hardest to drum up a crowd for his motorcycle stunt show.
“We want everyone to come out here and see it, it’s family friendly, G-rated entertainment. And we want the children out here to see it especially because it’s real live entertainment. It’s not an app, it’s not a screen, it’s not anything they could see on their phones. Just good old- fashioned entertainment like us old-timers got to see back in the day when we were kids,” said Weil.
He says his shows are a quickly-vanishing part of American entertainment history, but as long as the crowds keep coming, he'll keep riding.
“You feel the building move, you feel the vibration. You can’t—it’s like watching somebody kiss a girl on a movie screen and then kissing a girl in real life. There you have it,” said Weil.
Dean Griswold has been bringing his family to the fair for 20 years. He says there are some advantages to being a grandparent when it comes to a day of cow petting, funnel cakes, and rollercoasters.
“They’re going home with their parents! We can feed them all the sugar we want. We don’t care. The kids are just big enough so they can go on by themselves, so you stand at the end and go, ‘oh you were great,’” joked Griswold.
While the Washington County Fair ended Sunday, thrill seekers and agricultural enthusiasts alike can still get their fill at the Columbia County, Schaghticoke, Fonda, and New York State fairs for several more days.
