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Carnival in the Countryside
The History of the Iowa State Fair
By Chris Rasmussen University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-358-9
CHAPTER 1
The Founders of Civilization
AGRICULTURE AND CULTURE IN IOWA
The first Iowa State Fair was held, appropriately enough, in Fairfield in October 1854. As its opening day approached, visitors flocked to Fairfield, first by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, jamming Fairfield's usually quiet streets — the town's population scarcely topped one thousand — and filling its hotels to overflowing. Peddlers and entertainers lined the roads leading to the fairgrounds, vying with one another for fairgoers' attention and money. On opening day, a crowd estimated from seven to ten thousand people, by far the largest gathering in the history of the frontier state, congregated on and around the six-acre fairgrounds. In the summer and fall of 1854, carpenters had created the fairgrounds, enclosing it with a ten-foot-high board fence. They built a shed two hundred fifty feet long on the north side of the grounds to house the fair's many exhibits and constructed stalls and pens for livestock along the remaining sides of the enclosure. A quarter-mile track, cordoned off only by rope, was graded for the trotting races. In the center of this track stood a viewing stand for the fair's officers, judges, and speakers. The fair's officers rode and marched at the head of a parade from Fairfield to the fairgrounds, and the Iowa State Fair officially began.
George C. Dixon, a lawyer and newspaper publisher from Keokuk, delivered the fair's opening address, in which he declared the exhibition a historic event for Iowa. The fair, he proclaimed, was the very "heart" of the young state, and it would annually revitalize Iowa's farmers and send them back home to the state's "extremities" inspired to achieve the "high destiny" of agriculture. Dixon confessed that he was no farmer but began his address by proclaiming "some elemental truths": "The culture of the soil is not only the primitive calling of man, but it lies at the very bottom of the social fabric of the useful arts and social advancement." Tilling the earth distinguished civilization from savagery, and a society's progress in agriculture offered a sure index of its overall development. He invoked Thomas Jefferson's belief that independent farmers furnished the wellspring of America's republican traditions, and he quoted approvingly Daniel Webster's well-known declaration that "when tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers therefore are the founders of civilization," as the audience on the fairgrounds nodded in agreement.
Dixon's insistence on agriculture's importance belied a nagging suspicion that the status of farmers was precarious, and his hour-long address included both paeans to the dignity of farming and worries about its low prestige. His declaration that agriculture was "the primitive calling of man," which lay "at the very bottom of the social fabric," tellingly suggested that farming's status was far from exalted. Dixon lamented that other industries were speeding ahead in the nineteenth century, while farming remained comparatively static, the province of millions of unscientific "dirt farmers." He predicted that the state fair would help educate farmers and "raise up agriculture to the dignity of a useful art ... and establish it in its merited position." Dixon's ambiguous refrain, that farmers were both America's bedrock and laggards in a fast-moving era, reverberated not only across the fairgrounds, but throughout the fair's first century, as Iowans pondered the relationship between agriculture and culture.
Nineteenth-century Americans commonly took the measure of their civilization by counting its technological, economic, and cultural attainments. Many midwesterners reckoned their region's progress by tallying its booming population, crop yields, heads of livestock, railway mileage, and factory output to gauge the progress made since the frontier era. Nowhere was the effort to measure and foster civilization's advance more evident than at the annual state and county fair, which existed in large part to display, assess, and celebrate the progress that midwesterners had made over the past year and since the beginning of white settlement. Fairs' exhibits offered a measure of civilization's development and a vehicle for promoting economic and technological progress. State and county fairs did much more than award blue ribbons for cattle and hogs: they embodied and sought to build an economy and society in which agricultural bounty would give rise to cities, manufacturing, commerce, and, ultimately, a distinctive midwestern culture.
An Agricultural Society
Elkanah Watson organized both America's first agricultural society, an organization created to promote improved farming techniques, and America's first county fair, in western Massachusetts in 1810. Nineteenth-century Americans proudly boasted of the contrasts between their republic and European nations, and American fairs differed indeed from British agricultural exhibitions. Watson's fair, which became the model for fairs throughout the nation, aimed to be more egalitarian than its British forerunners, which were dominated by prominent landowners and livestock breeders. The staid and exclusive British model of an agricultural society, Watson observed, was "not congenial to the genius of our country [emphasis in original]," and so he created a fair that invited ordinary farmers to compete for premiums to improve America's crops, livestock, and manufactures. In order to educate farmers it was necessary to lure them onto the fairgrounds. As Watson also discovered, agricultural displays alone could not entice many of his neighbors to travel to the fair. To lure farmers to attend the fair, Watson's exhibitions offered "music, dancing, and singing, intermixt with religious exercises, and measures of solidity, so as to meet the feelings of every class of the community." The fair, as he observed, was not solely an agricultural exhibition but a social occasion for isolated, hard-working farm families.
Settlers transplanted Watson's "Berkshire system" of agricultural societies and fairs as they moved westward, and in no region of the country did fairs become more prominent or larger than in the Midwest. The level, fertile lands of the Mississippi Valley seemed ideally suited to agriculture, and many pioneers moved to the region to earn their living by farming. These settlers not only built farms and planted crops but also began the process of transplanting their conception of civilization to the prairie. Settlers considered agricultural fairs indispensable to their effort to build their economy and culture.
On June 1, 1833, the United States government officially opened Iowa for settlement, following the defeat of the Sac and Fox Indians led by Chief Black Hawk. Thousands of pioneers moved into the southeastern corner of the new territory and began constructing homes, farms, and communities. When Iowa became a federal territory in 1838, the second bill passed by the Territorial Legislature was "an Act to provide for the incorporation of Agricultural Societies," which permitted a group of twenty or more residents in any county to charter a corporation to foster agricultural and economic development by hosting an annual fair, awarding prizes for livestock, crops, manufactures, and other items, and by distributing information about scientific agriculture and domestic manufactures. In 1842 and 1843 the Territorial Legislature passed two more bills, spelling out agricultural societies' duties in greater detail and allocating public funds to the (as yet nonexistent) county societies in order to help them promote agriculture and domestic manufactures. But Iowans hardly raced to create agricultural societies in the 1840s. Settlers in Van Buren County founded an agricultural society in 1842 and held fairs in the fall of 1842 and 1843, after which the society disbanded. No other county societies were founded until the 1850s, when economic growth and government efforts to sponsor it gained momentum.
In 1853 members of the Jefferson County Agricultural Society resolved "to effect the organization of a State Agricultural Society" in Iowa and invited delegates from other county agricultural societies to meet in Fairfield in December to found the new organization. Their letter of invitation conveyed both the urgency of the task and their determination to speed the state's economic growth: "There is no free state in the union save Iowa," they wrote, "in which there is not a State Agricultural Society, organized and in successful operation. ... Is it not time for the farmers of Iowa to be aroused to the importance of such an organization in this state? Shall we be laggards in the race of improvement? Shall the resources of other states be developed, their wealth increased and their people elevated in the scale of intellectual being, and ours stand still?"
In December, representatives of several county agricultural societies convened in Fairfield, where they founded the Iowa State Agricultural Society, dedicated to "the promotion of agriculture, horticulture, manufactures, mechanics and household arts."
As a private corporation, the agricultural society had to raise its own revenues from membership dues and the proceeds of its annual state fair, and it often struggled to pay its bills. The society's officers insisted that its enormous contributions to developing Iowa's economy served the public interest and deserved public funding. Many of the society's leaders believed that it should be made a department of state government, funded entirely by the state, so that it would not be dependent on receipts from the fair. In 1857 the state legislature passed a statute granting the society an annual appropriation of $2,000 and specifying its duties: the society was now required to submit an annual report detailing its activities and assessing the condition of agriculture in the state and to collect annual reports from the growing number of county agricultural societies. County societies, in order to receive their annual appropriation of $200 from the state, were required to compile information about the condition of agriculture in their county.
The state agricultural society's new responsibilities enhanced its importance and made it a clearinghouse for agricultural information in Iowa. Many Iowans mistakenly assumed that the society was a state agency, funded generously by tax revenues, and grumbled that its officers held lucrative patronage jobs. In fact, the society received only nominal aid from the legislature, and its survival depended almost entirely on receipts from the annual state fair. Some society members urged the legislature to make the organization a full-fledged department of the state government, while other hoped that it could become self-supporting and cut its ties to the state. A hybrid — part state agency, part private corporation — the Iowa State Agricultural Society alternately benefited from and was burdened by its ties to the state government throughout its history.
Lawyers, Doctors, and "Sich"
The men who led the state agricultural society considered themselves "agriculturists," who sought to promote the adoption of scientific agriculture by Iowa's farmers. But to be an agriculturist was not necessarily to be a farmer, and the society's officers were hardly a representative cross-section of the state's citizens. Its first president, Thomas W. Clagett, had served in the Maryland House of Delegates before moving west to Keokuk to practice law and publish a local newspaper. Its first secretary, Dr. Joshua M. Shaffer, a twenty-four-year-old physician who moved to Iowa from Pennsylvania in 1852 to establish his medical practice, confided to a friend that he knew "no more of farming than a hog does of fast day." Throughout its history, the society's leaders included many livestock breeders, implement dealers, large landowners, investors, and politicians. Among its officers were future US Senator George Wright, two chief justices of the Iowa Supreme Court, and numerous state legislators and other officials. Many of these men owned farms and took a keen interest in the progress of scientific agriculture, but most of them earned their living sitting behind a desk, not following behind a plow. The absence of farmers among the society's directors frequently led the state's newspapers and agricultural periodicals to charge that businessmen, not farmers, ran the agricultural society and the state fair, and that the society and the fair did not serve farmers' interests.
Secretary Joshua Shaffer replied that running an agricultural society was a task too complicated to leave to farmers. Overseeing an agricultural society, he pointed out, entailed keeping records and accounts, negotiating with local politicians and merchants, corresponding with exhibitors, and booking and promoting the fair. As a result, he stated, "Lawyers, doctors and 'sich' are uniformly called upon to do the executive work of our Agricultural Society — not because they are supposed to know anything about agriculture — but because they understand business. ... If professional men were to withdraw their aid from our agricultural societies, as our farmers generally are & have been educated, the whole fabric would fall into ruin."
Agriculturists were eager to foster the growth of agriculture, industry, and commerce in Iowa and were irrepressibly optimistic in promoting the state's image. They were unabashed economic boosters, but they also considered themselves proponents of science. "Scientific agriculture," as agriculturists understood it, mixed business acumen and scientific expertise, and agricultural societies were instrumental in introducing and fostering both commercial agriculture and agricultural science in the Midwest. Agriculturists urged farmers to operate like other businessmen by seeking ways to maximize profits by minimizing costs and labor. They also worked to develop the region's economy by instructing "dirt farmers" in "book farming" so that the Midwest could fulfill its promise as a land of bounty. Agricultural society meetings included lectures on topics such as soil acidity and livestock diseases, and the society frequently distributed publications on scientific agriculture to farmers. The state agricultural society's most important task, however, was not to host lectures or distribute scientific treatises but to run the annual state fair, which promoted agricultural improvement by bringing together farmers and rewarding exemplary livestock, crops, and products.
The state agricultural society was not the only agency created in the 1850s to foster agricultural development in Iowa. In 1858 the legislature chartered the State Agricultural College and Model Farm, located west of present-day Ames. Suel Foster, an accomplished agriculturist and member of the state agricultural society who led the effort to establish the college, considered the new institution vital for promoting scientific agriculture and arresting the growth of "citified" habits among rural youth by imbuing them with an appreciation for rural life and a strong work ethic. The agricultural society's officers championed the creation of the agricultural college, and many of them served on its board of trustees. Despite the considerable ties between the agricultural society and the college, however, the two institutions had different strategies for developing Iowa's agricultural productivity, and they soon became rivals.
During its first years, the Iowa State Agricultural College and Model Farm consisted of little more than a small experimental farm. In 1862, however, Congress passed the Morrill Land Grant College Act, which allocated money to the states to create colleges to train students in agriculture and the mechanic arts. As the Iowa legislature prepared for the college to begin offering courses, it weighed the respective roles of the agricultural college and the agricultural society. The agricultural society's officers, who considered their organization the premier agency for developing Iowa's agricultural economy, drafted a proposal urging the state legislature to allow the directors of the society to "take charge of the affairs" of the college so that they "could have in charge the entire agricultural interests of the State." According to Joshua Shaffer, this plan "would bring the College Farm directly in contact with professed agriculturists." Two of the society's most eminent members, lawyer George G. Wright and agriculturist Peter Melendy, persuaded Shaffer to shelve his proposal, fearing that it would backfire and cause the legislature to diminish, rather than enhance, the agricultural society's authority. Shaffer confided to one society member that he had prudently decided to lie low, rather than tempt the "Gen 'Ass'" to alter the agricultural society's role.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Carnival in the Countryside by Chris Rasmussen. Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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