​So long, Summer... September 2024

For me, going to the Goshen County Fair is a tradition that marks the end of Summer and the beginning of Fall.  I always start my day at the fair at the southernmost barn to check out the pigs and the piglets.  Next is the sheep shed.  This year, I was taken with two sheep being prepping for the judging ring by two young girls.  They told me that their two adorable fuzzy sheep were Blacknose Valinais, a new breed that originated in Switzerland and that have a personality more like a dog than a sheep.
 
After the sheep, I stopped to watch the rabbit judging and admire all of the different breeds waiting in their cages.  My personal favorites are the dwarf lop-eared bunnies, but I am always amused by the Angola rabbits because they remind me of fuzzy slippers.  Then it was onward to the dairy barn and my traditional bottle of chocolate milk from the Litchfield County 4-H booth.  I chugged it down while I checked out the pony rides offered by Lee's Riding Stable.  My last animal barn visit was to the Poultry Shed where the din of cock-a-doodle-dos and cluck-cluck-clucking is always entertaining. 
 
Finally, I got a bag of warm, cinnamon-dusted apple fritters and fresh-squeezed lemonade to fuel me on my tour of the vegetable and fruit barn.  I always marvel at the simplicity of entries like "one ear of corn on a plate" and am always blown away by the extravaganza exhibits of the individual farm entries.  While the Finn Family of Winter Winds Farm never fails to lock up the competition, my favorite was the second-place Crosswich Farm exhibit, created by two great-granddaughters of Madeleine L'Engle, a famous children's author who grew up in Goshen.  They organized their exhibit around connections between books and farm products.
 
Edith Morton Chase was 19 when the first Goshen Fair commenced on September 5, 1910, and I can't help but wonder if she and her father attended that first Goshen Fair, and perhaps fairs thereafter.  I have to believe that as Miss Edith was developing her Topsmead property into the self-sustaining farm that it became, she attended Goshen Fairs, maybe even purchased livestock from the exhibiting farmers, maybe even submitted vegetables and fruit to the produce exhibitions.  Perhaps Lucy Burrall, the sister who loved to bake, entered the pie-baking contests. 
 
So, as the harvest machinery is at work in the fields of Topsmead and as I say "So long, Summer," I like to think that, just as it is for me, attending the Goshen Fair was a traditional marker of the end of summer for Miss Edith and Lucy and Mary Burrall.
 
 
Margaret Hunt
BlogMistress