Building Gypsy Rose

As a kid growing up in small-town Vermont, the annual fair was one of summer’s most anticipated events. From the moment that school let out I’d begin saving my pennies for a three day splurge on cotton candy, greasy onion rings, and twister rides.

It’s been decades since I’ve attended the Connecticut Valley Exposition (the fair that comes to my hometown of Bradford each summer), but for the last three years I’ve attended another small-town Vermont tradition known since 1867 as the Tunbridge World’s Fair.

These days, rather than licking candy coating off sticky fingers while standing in line for the next stomach-wrenching ride, I go mostly to people-watch and enjoy the nostalgia that the fairgrounds evoke.

Contemporary fairgoers include an interesting mix. There are the small town residents from the surrounding communities that seem little changed from the population I’d known decades ago. (While rural Vermont has not been without the growth mantra that has rapidly transformed so many communities over time, the pace in Tunbridge is still much the same as it was when the first fair came to town.) There are also the many that come to the fair seeking an experience that they might not have enjoyed during their own upbringing. For them, the Tunbridge World’s Fair has become an iconic relic of small-town summer fun – a chance to put on a flannel shirt or John Deere cap and take a break from their otherwise more urbanized lives.

Thirty miles up the road from Tunbridge, my family’s Bradford home had been surrounded by dairy farms when I was a kid. Many of my childhood friends were from farm families. They proudly wore their Future Farmers of America jackets or 4-H T-shirts and rose early to do the morning chores before boarding the bus for school. Many of those kids brought their prize animals to show at the annual summer fair.

Today, more than three quarters of those family farms no longer exist. The Stockman farm that bordered our land to the north has disappeared, the barns taken down and the land subdivided for homes that look woefully out of place in the orchard where I’d picked apples in my youth. The Hatch farm to the south met a similar fate. Not a trace of the old red barn stands today. A plastic-sided over-sized “residence” stands awkwardly in the former hay pasture I’d known as a child.

I still go to Bradford often for family visits. I walk the old roads and note all that has changed since I was a boy. I note, too, all that has remained unchanged, finding much comfort in the familiar. While our contemporary throw-away cultures leave us little opportunity to show our children anything more than photographs of that which once was, I like the fact that places remain where I can tell the stories and still touch the spot.

After 141 years, the Tunbridge World’s Fair still draws a crowd. Old-timers and youth alike continue the rural Vermont traditions while I take an annual pause to celebrate the landscapes and people that define the world in which I was raised.