Amador County Fair

Before each arena event at the Amador County Fair, a cannon fires hot corndogs into the grandstand of the Benny Brown Arena. They fly without sticks, each sent with a napkin and a mustard packet. The cannon was the idea of the fair’s chief executive, Rich Hoffman. KCRA, the Sacramento television station, reported in 2026 that the cannon is found only at this fair. “Before each arena event, we go out and crank some corn dogs into the crowd,” Hoffman told the station.

The fair runs four days, Thursday through Sunday, at the turn of July into August, on the county fairgrounds in Plymouth. The 26th District Agricultural Association puts it on. The 2026 fair ran July 30 to August 2 under the theme “More Cowbell!” and held a cowbell decorating contest. The 2025 fair had called itself “The Happiest Place on Dirt.” The 2027 fair is set for July 29 to August 1. Hoffman’s account of the fair: “It’s connecting to agriculture. It’s connecting to the spirit of our rural community.”

Barns, arena and bandstands

The livestock come first. Each morning of the fair the Log Cabin entrance gate on Empire Street opens at 7 a.m., two hours ahead of the fair, for people bound for the shows.

The 2026 schedule ran as follows:

• Before opening day: rabbits, cavies, turkeys, poultry and eggs went before judges in the Fur ‘N’ Feathers shows, some of them on the Tuesday and Wednesday before the gates opened.
• Thursday: market swine entered the main show ring at 8 a.m., and market lambs followed in the Simmons Family Beef Pavilion.
• Friday: market beef, breeding cattle and market goats.
• Saturday: the 4-H, FFA and Grange Round Robin and a Livestock Beauty Pageant.

Rochelle Keith, showing a sheep and a chicken in 2026, told KCRA, “I’m an animal person. I love animals.” Luca Downie, 17, said raising stock had “really helped me with responsibility and leadership and getting me out in front of everybody else.”

Each day carries a name. Thursday is Kids’ Day, when children 12 and under enter free until 6 p.m. Friday is Seniors’ Day. Saturday is Cattlemen’s Day, which opens at 7 a.m. in the Benny Brown Arena with cattle sorting, calf branding, cattle penning and team roping. Sunday is Junior Livestock Auction Day. At 10:30 that morning the Ralph Clark Memorial Junior Livestock Auction begins in the barns. It sells agricultural mechanics projects first, then beef, turkeys, swine, rabbits, lambs, poultry and market goats.

Thursday starts in town with the City of Plymouth Kids’ Day Parade, followed by the opening ceremony. The fair’s ticket page puts the parade’s start at 8 a.m. by City Hall on Main Street. The 2026 entertainment schedule lists it at 10.

The arena fills each night:

• Thursday: the rodeo queen is crowned, and then comes the Frank Halvorson Memorial Mutton Bustin’, where, in the Folsom Times’ words, “pint-sized cowboys and cowgirls ride sheep for glory.”
• Friday: the Hot Rod Truck Pulls, opened in 2026 by a tug-of-war between the Amador Sheriff and Amador Fire.
• Saturday: the CCPRA rodeo.
• Sunday: the Jackson Rancheria Destruction Derby closes the fair. In 2026 its reserved grandstand seats sold out.

The 2026 Miss Amador County Fair Rodeo Queen is Kyra Brown, 16, a junior at Lodi High School, who gave her motto as “Serve, sparkle and inspire.” The Miss Amador Scholarship Competition is held on the Biagi Bandstand on Thursday evening. The winner serves a year as official hostess of the fair and the county. Cooper Cheetham, the 2025 rodeo queen, holds the 2026 Miss Amador title.

Three stages run into the night. In 2026 Picnic Hill had:

• Bad Miller Revival, playing the music of Bad Company, Steve Miller and CCR, on Thursday
• the Spazmatics on Friday
• the Ariel Jean Band on Saturday
• Fenix Caló on Sunday

The Coors Stage and the Biagi Bandstand carried acts such as Inverness 95, Three Shots of Rock, a yacht-rock band called Ride Captain Ride, and Lynsey and Prime Country.

The carnival on Carnival Hill opens at noon. The Folsom Times listed the 2025 fair’s food as corndogs, funnel cakes, tri-tip sandwiches, deep-fried treats and lemonade. On Friday evening a wine tasting for those 21 and over, ticketed separately, sets up on the Floriculture Lawn. The gates close at midnight on Thursday and Sunday and at 1 a.m. on Friday and Saturday.

Frontier Town and the steam sawmill

The older trades run through the day. At 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. the Early Day Gas Engine & Tractor Association, Branch 13, parades antique tractors down the midway. By the gas engines a steam-powered sawmill cuts at 11 and 3, and again at 8 in the evening on Friday and Saturday. The Amador Sawmill & Mining Association works the Pokerville Mine, a gold mine and stamp mill.

In Frontier Town the Kit Carson Mountain Men keep up living history from 11 to 5, with blacksmith demonstrations by David Downing. On Picnic Hill the Sierra Native American Tribal Council sets up a Miwok Village. Station KVGC, AM 1340, broadcasts from the Media Stage with Jim Guidi.

Adult entries in art, photography and quilts hang in Pokerville Hall, and junior entries hang in the Spur Emporium. In Pokerville Hall the Sierra Gold Quilters and the Mother Lode Quilt Guild quilt, the Del Oro Spinners & Weavers work their wheels and looms, and paintings and photographs from the competition are offered for sale. In 2026 demonstrators there decorated gourds and fiber vases, and a potter threw pots on the wheel Saturday evening. Members of the Mother Lode Rose Society took questions about roses in the Floriculture Building, and Master Gardeners gave demonstrations by the pond. Fairgoers who sign up in the entry department can paint a scene of the fair in a plein air contest.

Harness races at Ione, a tent at Plymouth

The fair began in Ione in 1887 as the first fair of the 26th District Agricultural Association. It was called the Amador and Sacramento County Annual Fair. Its entry book was the Premium List and Speed Program. The “speed” was harness racing, held on a track in what is now Howard Park. The fair’s history says the track had a reputation as one of the fastest in California.

In 1938 the fair moved to Plymouth and was held under a large tent on the playground of what is now Plymouth Elementary School. A Board of Directors formed that year, with Jim Loyd as manager and Ruth Cooper as secretary. Harold Colburn presided over that first board and was president for some twenty years. He stayed a member until his retirement in 1985, forty-seven years in all. In the early days, according to the fair’s history, he would pick up the old crank two-piece telephone and call the Governor’s office direct, “and the Governor would answer!” The two discussed board appointments and the fair’s money.

The fair bought its ground piece by piece:

• 1940: J.M. and Gladys Loyd sold the first 8.06 acres for $1,250.
• 1941: Lubenko sold a further half acre.
• 1947: The Detert Estate sold 23 acres, also for $1,250. The fair’s history calls the sale “in reality, a gift to the people of Amador County in memory of W. F. Detert.”
• 1955: The association sold 5½ acres to the Oro Madre School District for the elementary school. It then bought a final 5 acres from the Grielich family for $7,470.

That last cost was recovered from the state’s Fairs and Expositions Fund, which drew a small share of the betting on horse racing legalized under the 1933 Horse Racing Act. The fair’s history records a fair every year except during World War II, when all fairs in California were postponed.

Goula Waite’s grounds

Goula Waite became secretary-manager in 1941 and held the post until 1965. She scoured the countryside for the pieces that built Frontier Town, among them a beveled glass window, a marble barber sink and a breakfront. She also laid out the grounds for foot traffic, vendor access, livestock and the carnival. In 1965 she left to become the state’s Exhibit Supervisor, traveling to every fair to audit premium records. The fair history says she went “casting fear into the hearts of all entry clerks.”

Dick Cooper ran the fair from 1966 through 1971 and acquired the sawmill that still runs at fair time. He later became a Shenandoah Valley grape grower and vintner and a bandleader, and he has poured at the Friday wine tasting. Pete Scott, manager from 1972 to 1977, built the original Wine Garden, the covered bridge, the “old well” drinking fountains and the rustic Main Gate facade. He also drew the fair’s posters before leaving for the California State Fair.

Ralph Clark, a nationally recognized cattle judge, managed 27 fairs from 1978 to the end of 2004. Between fairs he brought livestock shows and sales to the grounds, and the junior auction now carries his name. His wife, Susan Clark, had been CEO of the El Dorado County Fair for more than twenty years. She followed him here until late 2007. B. Troy Bowers served from 2007 to 2019.

Hoffman grew up in the county, showed in the junior livestock program as a boy, and was president of the Sutter Creek FFA chapter. He had spent 15 years as chief executive of Jackson Rancheria when he tried to retire in September 2019. He took the fair instead.

The fair history also names two volunteers. Louise Hall, a home economics teacher at Amador High School and a longtime director, promoted still exhibits for adults and young people. Evelyn Bishop tended the flowers, oversaw the Junior Building exhibits, promoted 4-H across the county and set the standard for the grounds’ landscaping. She worked until she was 90 and died in 1993. Those who knew her well, the history says, will tell you that stepping in the flower beds or wading in “Evelyn’s Pond” can still bring down her wrath.

Since February 2009 the Amador County Fair Foundation has raised money for the grounds. Pat Crew, Ray Ryan, Stan Lukowicz and others founded it with proceeds from the Amador Four Fires Festival. The foundation has paid for the Simmons Beef Pavilion, the Wolin Arena, new façades on Pokerville Hall and the Spur Building, and a rebuilt viewing stand at the Benny Brown Arena.

A marker stands by that arena, erected in 1998 by The Friends of Benny Brown, Jr. Brown was a fourth-generation rancher from Ione, with summer range in the mountains near Kirkwood. He first competed in the arena in 1951, at 13. The event was cattle penning; his mother was his partner, and he won. For nearly fifty years afterward he was Amador County’s hometown rodeo cowboy, and later a steer wrestler on the senior pro circuit. He died in 1998. The marker gives his words: “I’m doing so good, if I was doing any better I couldn’t stand it.”