Westchester has a real country fair. Not a street festival, not a pumpkin patch with a bouncy house. A fair with a livestock tent, a tractor parade and blue ribbons for needlework. It is 102 years old this September, and the reason it exists is that one man got tired of being doubted about his potatoes.
The Argument That Started It
The Grange was a national thing first, organized on December 4, 1867 in Washington, D.C. as the country's first organized agricultural movement. The word itself just means a farm. Yorktown got its own chapter on December 30, 1898, with 17 members.
Look at the names on that early roster and you are basically reading a Yorktown street map. Strang. Hill. Curry. Hyatt. Mead. Moseman. Lee. Kear. Those were the farmers, and the roads got named after them later.
In 1920 the Grange bought its own building at Hanover Street and Railroad Avenue for $2,400. Having a hall meant having somewhere to hold things. And what they held, according to the fair's own history, came out of a running argument among the members about who grew the best vegetables. Chester Hyatt suggested they hold a fair so he could show off his potato crop and see if anybody could match it. The first Yorktown Grange Fair was held on October 19, 1924.
They Have Been Judging Ever Since
The categories now are vegetables, flowers, needlework, baking, photography, livestock and poultry. There is a cow milking contest. There is a watermelon eating contest. There is a mechanical bull, which Chester Hyatt did not see coming.
One tradition goes all the way back. In the early years the produce, baking and flower entries were auctioned off after the judging, and that auction became the traditional finale of the fair. It still is. You can win a ribbon for your tomatoes in the afternoon and watch a neighbor buy them before dinner.
The Year It Rained For Three Days
The fair outgrew the little hall fast. Starting in 1946 it moved to the old Yorktown School, now the Community and Cultural Center, with exhibits in the gymnasium and tents outside for the animals. Eventually the original hall got too expensive to keep, so the Grange sold it, bought about 14 acres on Moseman Road and built a new one. Note the road name. They built the fairgrounds on a street named after one of their own founding families.
The first fair on the new grounds was in 1954, and it was a disaster. Three days of heavy rain turned the place knee deep in mud and the fair lost money. Then the good news arrived. The previous year's fair had been entered as a community service project with the State Grange. It placed first in New York and won a plaque and $200. The National Grange added another plaque and $500. They kept going. The Fair Association was formed that December to run the thing properly, and it first met on February 24, 1955.
The Quiet Hour
This is the detail that made me want to write about it at all. The first hour of the fair each day is a quiet hour. No loud noises. The fair's own site says it is a perfect time for people with special needs to enjoy the fair, and that is the whole explanation. Nobody made a campaign out of it. They just do it.
The rest of it runs the same way. It is a not for profit and it is run by volunteers, and admission and fair revenue go toward the grounds, next year's fair, and local charities and service organizations. The Yorktown Grange Agricultural Society incorporated as a nonprofit in March 2021.
Go This Month
The 102nd Yorktown Grange Fair runs Friday September 11 from 4 to 11 p.m., Saturday September 12 from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., and Sunday September 13 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., at 99 Moseman Road in Yorktown Heights. Admission is $15 per carload, or $10 if you buy it in advance, and kids under 2 are free. The tractor parade is Saturday. This year's theme is Goats, Games and Good Times.
Thank you to Eileen and Jim Seaboldt, who wrote the fair's history for the Grange's own site, which is where almost everything here came from.
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