The Boonville Fair: A History

An “old time country fair — country style” will welcome visitors to fruitful Anderson Valley next month.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 13, 14, 15 are the dates posted on the big red apple painted on the right hand side of the giant 24-sheet wooden sign at the fairgrounds here.

The same dates are marked down on hundreds of household calendars in all part of Northern California by devotees of the great American form of rural entertainment — the country fair. “We get ’em from all parts of the country,” smiled Harwood J. June, the late friendly, blue-eyed, pipe-smoking justice of the peace in Anderson Valley for 25 years. June was still Fair Manager as late as 1984. One of the originators of the fair, he was its manager since 1937 when the tiny “Apple Show,” housed in a single 100 by 60 foot redwood building, officially became the Mendocino County Fair.

Once a show window for fruitful Anderson Valley, one of the earliest areas in Northern California to commercially produce apples and home of what boosters modestly assert are the “sweetest grapes grown in all the Redwood Empire,” the fair has become the show window for all of Mendocino County's agricultural and industrial wealth.

It has grown. But it has lost none of its spontaneous charm, its warm-hearted appeal and its neighborliness that marked its beginning.

The three-day fun festival was The People's Fair — when it was originated in 1926 as an outgrowth of an idea from a young Anderson Valley resident after he visited the Cloverdale Citrus Fair. It was The People's Fair when it was renamed the Mendocino County Fair combined with the Anderson Valley Apple Show — and it has remained The People's Fair through succeeding years.

The event offers one of the widest ranges of agricultural, horticultural, livestock, floriculture and industrial classes of any fair in California other than the California State Fair and the Pomona County Fair. (That's what the state said officially in an audit report in 1949, anyway.) And it is still The People’s Fair.

“That's the policy — has been the policy right on through the years,” said Judge June. “It's the show window of the county for the farmers and we like to keep it that way. I think if anyone asked any Grange or Farm Center in the county their opinion of the fair, they'd say it's their fair. They all take pride in it. We're guided by their suggestions — we make it strictly a cooperative deal.”

Certainly that's the case in Anderson Valley. From Yorkville, site of an early day stage stop on the eastern edge of the Valley where the photogenic McDonalds-To-The-Sea highway (State Route No. 128) enters, to the mouth of the Navarro River, valley folks, whether their homes are in Yorkville, Boonville, Philo or Navarro, or any of the area in between, are fair boosters — and workers.

Since its inception back in 1937, the fair has traditionally been the final event of the long list of fine agricultural expositions in the Redwood Empire that traditionally open each year with the Cloverdale Citrus Fair in February.

In many respects there's a similarity between the two.

They're both large scale neighborhood parties. Both are results of a whole hearted pioneer spirit of pitching in and helping on the part of folks living in the Fair communities.

They're even closer — for the Cloverdale Citrus Fair, one of the oldest community events in the area, is the “daddy” of the Mendocino County Fair.

It happened, Judge June, one of the “ringleaders,” recalls, like this:

A large group of Anderson Valley folks went neighboring to the Cloverdale fair in 1926. It wasn't their first visit to their Sonoma County neighbors. It had become a sort of a custom in the valley for the folks to drive down to Cloverdale, look over the exhibits and meet old friends from all parts of the north coast area there. More than just an exhibit of oranges artistically displayed in feature booths sponsored by organizations, schools and individuals — it was a chance for a good old fashioned get-together — a time and a place to talk over old times, to discuss crops, and to find out that their friends were just as puzzled and worried over rising taxes and “how they're running the country back in Washington” as they themselves were.

One of the party was a young man named Chester Estell.

He was struck by the Cloverdale fair. He saw it as a show window of the area's finest products and saw the value of getting folks together to talk over conditions and to interchange ideas.

He kept talking about the value of a co-ordinated celebration of some kind for his own community. Why not a Fourth of July celebration? A bang-up affair with razzle-dazzle fireworks, maybe shoot off a few anvils (an early-day form of noisemaking that the younger generation probably never heard of. It consisted of turning one anvil on its face, bottom up, and filling the square anchor hole with black powder and attaching a fuse. Then the second anvil was overturned on top of the first one. When the powder was ignited there was a satisfying boom).

“Well, sir,” Judge June said, “the idea sort of took hold. Several more of the fellows got to talking about the idea. Then they remembered that at an earlier meeting of the Anderson Valley Farm Center some of the members who had been to Cloverdale wondered if the same thing couldn't be done with apples — like they had done over Sebastopol way.”

The upshot of the matter was that at the next Farm Center meeting the idea was again discussed. By that time it had been reduced to a concise plan and presented.

Members liked the idea. They discussed pro and con.

At height of the discussion one of the members rose to his feet.

“Heck,” he said, “any place can have a Fourth of July celebration — not that there's any discredit intended on Fourth of July celebrations, but they can be put on without much imagination — or much originality. All you need is a politician for a speech, and they're a dime a dozen, a band, some flags and some firecrackers. But not every place can put on an apple show. They don't all have apples — not apples like we raise in Anderson Valley anyway. We’ve got ’em — let's have an apple show.”

In a wave of enthusiastic applause that greeted his remarks, the Anderson Valley Apple Show was born.

The Anderson Valley Farm Center was three years old that year. Its members had been looking around for something to get their teeth in — some project for community betterment. This was it — the Apple Show.

Judge June was Farm Center chairman at the time. The farm organization represented the whole ten-mile sweep of valley — Yorkville, Boonville, Philo and Navarro and all the farm and timberland in between.

He and other Center directors got together and appointed the late Donald McIntosh as first fair manager — to serve without pay.

Then, with the stage all set for a show — officers named, and plenty of apples assured, for the bloom that year gave promise of the same kind of bumper crop that Anderson Valley folks just naturally take for granted — an important question was raised:

“Where’ll we hold it?” someone asked.

That caused a pause — a very brief pause — in the rush of plans,

Someone else recalled that “Doc” Caldwell owned a sizable piece of land right in town.

The very next day the committee got together with “Doc” and sounded him out on the prospects of buying an acre and a half of his farm. They were in a position to buy it, they assured him — if he were willing to wait for his money until such time as the first fair was over and the finances counted.

He was an Anderson Valley booster, too. His reaction was typical. He said: “Sure, go ahead.”

Then came a campaign to raise money. An exhibit pavilion would be needed if they were going to show apples, and grapes, and big vegetables, and flowers from the women folk's gardens.

That didn't take long, either. In jig time they bad raised $650 and posted a call for volunteer workers to help put up the building.

“Everyone donated either cash or time — or both,” Judge June continued. “Everyone was willing. The word got spread around the Valley that if a man didn't donate, well, he just didn't belong here — that's all.”

Nobody had to move from the stress of public opinion. More enthusiastic men showed up with tools than there was lumber for them to work on. Their wives came along with baskets of lunch. Someone started a fire and got the big picnic-sized coffee pot boiling — and almost before they knew it they had an exhibit pavilion.

There wasn't anything fancy about it. It was just a square-cornered, quarter-pitch roofed building 100 feet long by 60 feet wide. And about half of it, a space 50 by 40 feet, was railed off as a dance floor.

But it was a substantial building. It was built of honest Mendocino County Redwood — “the finest we could get” — and the roof was heavy gauge corrugated iron. A small stage was built on one end.

With the building finished, committee members scoured the countryside to get the biggest pumpkins, the tallest corn, the huskiest heads of cabbage and the finest, most brilliantly colored and most highly perfumed apples earmarked for the first show.

Still others started rounding up awards.

“We couldn't offer any cash awards — no cash,” Judge June said. “But we managed to prevail on some of the businesses that we traded with to set up prizes.”

He still has one — a silver cup donated by the Montgomery Ward firm which did a big catalogue business in the valley — as the first award for the “most artistic and original design and arrangement of booth.”

It was won by the main feature booth of the fair — an old-time farmhouse kitchen scene, complete with red brick fireplace, an old muzzle-loading gun hanging over the mantle, and rawhide bottomed chair and a corncob stoppered demijohn sitting on the hearth. Around it were arranged the finest fruits and vegetables that could be found on the farms of Judge June, and the late S.T. McAbee and J. Fenton, who jointly sponsored the exhibit.

“I guess the reason we won was there weren't very many in competition. I forget how many feature booths there were that year — but there couldn't have been very many, for by the time you take a 40 by 50 dance floor out of a building 60 by 100 feet, there isn't too much room left.”

But all available space was filled. The Farm Center had an exhibit. So did the Grange. Big “set pieces” were arranged around the walls. The spicy apples that formed most of the backgrounds of the artistic displays filled the air with their fragrance.

The entertainment program on the stage was a huge success while the nightly dances made a hit with the 1926 version of the bobby soxer set.

Because building the pavilion and rounding up all the features for the show took so much time, the opening of the fair was later than the boosters had at first hoped. All the other fairs and community shows in the Empire were past. The Anderson Valley Apple Show was the windup of the series.

But rather than being a deterrent, the later date proved to help. It was popular — so popular that it has remained from that time on the final event on the Empire's events and celebrations calendar.

“The late date makes the exhibits all the better,” Judge June said. “We can show a little of everything we grow here.”

For many years the apple displays of the late August Gossman were a major highlight of the fair.

An apple hobbyist, August spent must of his time collecting apple varieties to bud or graft to trees in his little orchard. Each year he showed around 50 varieties. The tradition of showing the Gossman products continued, however, after his passing, and apples from his favorite trees were still on plate displays in the big hall into the 1980s.

As the Anderson Valley Apple Fair — customarily called the “Boonville Apple Show” by its fans — the annual event grew year by year.

Occupying the entire east side in the rear wing of the big wooden building, the floral show centers on a woodland theme.

Towering redwoods, sprawling liveoaks and dense masses of ferns made a wooded setting typical of the woodland area of Mendocino County to serve as a foil for the displays of autumn flowers that made up the feature part of the display.

Redwood products, particularly redwood novelties, called attention to the importance of the lumbering industry in the area.

Lumbering in the area dates to the early 1860s when John Gschwend's water-powered mill on the Navarro River west of Boonville launched the inland redwood lumbering industry in the area.

Unlike some of the areas, lumbering didn't “die out” during the period of slump in production of the sturdy, time, decay and fire-resistant building material that first attracted the attention of early day Empire builders.

“We've always had some mill activity around the valley,” Judge June said.

There were over 20 mills, large and small, operating in the area, adding their output to the economy of the county in an industry that intensified in the years following World War II days.

The Fair continued as the strictly community event until 1937 when, thanks to the aid given by Judge Lilburn Gibson of the Mendocino County Superior Court, then District Attorney, who “ironed out the legal wrinkles,” it gained the official designation as the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show.

From the little pavilion and the acre and half of land bought “by jawbone” back in 1926, the fair's facilities grew to a modern fair plant comprising 25 acres — three additional acres were added in 1984 by purchase. It’s compact and well laid out — unlike fairgrounds in any other community of the area — and it’s located on the main street of the town.

The main exhibit hall, a large white painted redwood building that has grown up around the old original structure, is located directly in the town, across the street from the stores and cafes that make up much of the business life of the little community of Boonville.

The new land bought in 1984 was used for moving the stock farms to a new location. It was bought from Russell Tolman, and adjoins the fairgrounds on the north.

In addition to the main exhibit hall, the facilities include five stock barns, wooden framed, metal roofed shelters, a Butler-type metal building 70 by 200 built in 1983 as a machinery building, but which is houses over-flow agricultural exhibits from the main hall, as well as the Unity Club’s Garden Section, 4-H and FFA exhibits and the commercial department.

There's a separate Poultry Building that houses a big display of local poultry — chickens of various types, turkeys, rabbits and pigeons.

There are two horse barns, each with 30 box stalls for the rodeo stock.

There’s the big 1,400 capacity grandstand, dedicated in 1983, and in 1984, portable bleachers were added at either side of it, accommodating 250 more to handle the overflow crowd, Judge June said.

There's a large sanitary building equipped with showers for exhibitors.

There’s also a big traveling carnival with a variety of popular rides and games.

On the infield of the track that fronts the grandstand there are permanently constructed rodeo chutes at one end, and at the other a full scale baseball diamond — for the fairgrounds at Boonville aren't fairgrounds that are used once a year only to lay idle the balance of the 12-month period between fairs.