[By Marcia Milner-Brage at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, USA]
It’s HOT. It’s HUMID. It’s CROWDED. It’s oh-so-AMAZING! It’s the IOWA STATE FAIR. For eleven days every August, it’s the place to go to experience the BEST OF IOWA.
This year for my day at the Fair, I arrived at 9AM and headed to the Agriculture Building to gaze upon the prize-winning jumbo vegetables. It was so stifling hot in there, I couldn’t stay long. The vegetables were holding up pretty good laid out on their paper plates, some with ribbons. (I can only imagine what condition they’ll be in five days hence, at the end of the Fair.) The above drawing was from my 2013 day at the Fair.
I made a beeline for the Beard Growing Contest. (On the way, I scurried past the Cook-out Contest on the Grand Concourse where the finalists from the County Cook-out Contests were stoking up grills and smokers to prepare original recipes of beef, pork, poultry or lamb for the judges. Sage Buttered Turkey won, by the way.)
Pioneer Hall was dense with whiskery dudes, adoring followers and curiosity seekers. The Longest Beard contestants were the first to be called to the stage. Each was given a numbered placard to hang from their neck.
Next, the Best Groomed Beards were called. Second place was my favorite (below left)—Gary Miller, number 246, aged 68 from Pleasantville with his pure white, impeccably shaped paddle of a beard. Then Most Unique Beards took the stage. Dakota Rundlett, age 25, from Vinton was a shoe-in for a blue ribbon (below right).
I guess everyone else of the 88,000 people who attended the day I was there thought the same thing: You must see the the Fattest Boar at the Swine Barn. Lugnut (pictured below)—all 1,148 pounds of him—slept blissfully as the masses shuffled by. No time or room for anything but the quickest of sketches. A little girl peered down on the snouty winner, her pigtails remarkably similar to the shape of the pig’s ears.
Back at the Agriculture Building, six-hundred pounds of butter is used every year to sculpt the famous Iowa State Fair Butter Cow. Below, my drawing from the 2013 Fair.
A quick walk through the Sheep Barn and then the Cattle Barn. Seeing the animals is always a treat for a city person like myself. And I love seeing the people who have brought their animals to the Fair.
By mid-afternoon I was flagging from the heat and humidity and being on my feet all day. At the air-conditioned Exhibition Center I gained some relief and a quick sketch of horses prancing in the arena.
So far, I’d just captured vignettes of the Fair. I wanted to see if I could show the larger place that surrounds the fairgrounds. I found a shaded park bench next to the one-room First Church at the head of the Grand Concourse. Looking down this fairground main street facing due west, the gold-domed Iowa Statehouse is two miles away in the distant Des Moines downtown. As I sketched my last drawing of the day, harmonizing voices singing hymns accompanied by a piano drifted through the open windows of the tiny church.
Heads up for those coming to the Urban Sketchers Symposium in Chicago next summer. You might factor into your extended trip plans to the United States a couple days at the Iowa State Fair 2017 (August 10-20). It’s about a five hour drive from Chicago to Des Moines. It’s about a one hour flight. You’re sure to be rewarded by a rich dose of Midwestern Americana and pre-WWI exposition architecture to sketch and delight in.