Chelan County Fair

At the 2026 Chelan County Fair, a purple special-award ribbon hung on a handmade chicken seated on a red toilet. The bird held a coffee mug lettered “COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO,” a cigarette stuck out of its beak, and a can labeled “FOWL FRESH” stood beside it. Andrew Simpson of the Cashmere Valley Record found it in the exhibit buildings. Nearby stood a Lego model of Notre-Dame de Paris, a spiral galaxy built from hundreds of Lego pieces, and a collection of miniatures that included the familiar Skookum sign.

The fair runs Thursday through Sunday on the weekend after Labor Day at the Chelan County Expo Center, a 33-acre grounds in Cashmere that the county owns and operates. The town sits on the south bank of the Wenatchee River, and fruit orchards cover the narrow benches of land around it. The 2026 fair ran September 10 to 13.

Ribbons, pens and the midway

In the exhibit halls, vegetables and fruit sit in rows beside their entry cards. The largest pumpkin of 2026 was a pale one grown by Allan Kaas. It sat on a stars-and-stripes display with a blue Best of Class ribbon. A snake gourd stretched nearly the length of its table, peppers of nearly every shape and color lined another, and apples bearing ribbons filled a long display. Quilts hung overhead, and paintings and photographs stood ready for judging. A 2022 account in The Wenatchee World placed the Boswell Building just inside the main gate on Kimber Road, with flowers, fruit, vegetables, home-vinted wine and home-brewed beer on show.

In the livestock barns, 4-H and FFA members show animals they have spent months raising. On the Friday of the 2026 fair, a small hand reached through a pen to touch a pig’s wet nose. The youth livestock auction comes at the end of the week. Fairgoers watch, bid on and buy the animals, and buyers can add contributions on top of their bids. Summer Miller runs Unbroken Creative, an interactive shop in Chelan, and 2026 was her fourth year bringing part of it to the fair. She watches the whole week from her booth. “We kind of start by watching the FFA kids and the Grange kids at the beginning of the fair,” she told NCWLIFE. “So like on Wednesday, Thursday and then at the end we get to meet the parents. So all the kids kind of come and congregate in our booth and hang out and play. And then at the end we just see them show their animals and do auction.” More than 50 vendors set up that year, the most the fair had ever had.

Each day has a name. Thursday is Senior Citizen Day, when visitors 62 and over enter free until 4 p.m. Friday is Kids Agrication Day, Saturday is County Day, and Sunday is Family Day. The Main Stage opens at 10 a.m. with Reptile Isle several times a day, Matt Baker, the Rusty Barbed Wire Boys and Jim Bryant. The players of Circus Luminescence perform on the stage and also stroll the grounds. At a 2026 reptile show, a boy named Bowden held a small alligator with a handler’s help. Children climbed into the seat of a New Holland tractor on display. A vendor at Timbo’s Licorice Rope held up the long candy ropes, and candidates for county office worked booths beside the commercial stands. There was a car show as well.

Davis Shows Carnival runs the midway. It opens at 2 p.m. on Thursday and Friday and at 11 a.m. on the weekend, and it stays open until 11 p.m. or later every night but Sunday. On the Friday night of 2026, riders waited to launch on the Extreme Scream, children rounded the turns of a dragon-themed kiddie coaster, and a young fairgoer fished for a stuffed-animal prize under the midway lights.

Two evening concerts on the arena grounds come with fair admission. In 2026, John Morgan played Thursday. He grew up in Sylva, North Carolina, playing bluegrass festivals in his family band, and he has written 16 songs for Jason Aldean. RaeLynn headlined Friday. Jessie Leigh, raised in a rural Oregon community, opened for her and then played the Tillicum Beer Garden after the main show.

The corn stand

Corn on the cob comes from one of the very few permanent food structures on the fairgrounds. The American Legion has sold corn there since the fair began in 1952. It was one of three original nonprofit food stands, and its proceeds paid for the Legion’s annual operations. The Legion stayed away for a couple of years at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and returned in 2022.

In 2025 the Mission Creek Community Club staffed the stand, working with the Legion toward a complete takeover. The American flags still flew, and the corn sold for the same price as the year before. Tracy Schakohl, the club’s treasurer, listed what the money supports: scholarships for graduating high school seniors, a Christmas program for foster children, and holiday food baskets. “Everything that comes in, goes out,” he said. That first year the club could not serve the Legion’s biscuits and gravy. People were “disappointed, but they understand,” Schakohl said, and Legion members were helping the club through the season. “It’s overwhelming,” he said, “but we’re going to make it happen because we want to honor the tradition.”

The Cindy Fowler Memorial Arena

The PRCA rodeo runs twice, Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, and is free with fair admission. The program includes bareback riding, steer wrestling, tie-down roping, saddle bronc riding, breakaway roping, team roping, barrel racing and bull riding, with preshow activities beforehand. The rodeo queen pageant is held on the rodeo grounds Saturday morning.

Before the first chute opened on Saturday, September 12, 2026, the Tillicum Riders Drill Team rode in carrying flags for the branches of the U.S. military. The announcer then recognized county first responders, tying the tribute to the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and to the firefighters who had worked fires in the county. Next came the Canadian flag, for the competitors from north of the border. The 2026 rodeo queen, Josie Weaver, rode in with a large American flag while spectators stood with their hats off. A prayer for competitors, livestock, arena workers and spectators followed, then the national anthem. Then bucking horses broke from the chutes beneath the Cashmere hills.

The arena took its present name on July 7, 2025, when the county commissioners renamed it for Cindy Fowler, who had died unexpectedly that summer. Fowler served on the fair board for more than 14 years, including on its rodeo committee. She founded the Tillicum Riders Rodeo Drill Team in 2000 and coached the Washington High School Equestrian Team for 14 years, often lending her own horses to young riders who had none. “She set the bar super high, but never so high that we would fall,” said Shannon Sims, who led the drill team with Tanya Thompson. “Without her, I would never have been a barrel racer.”

At the 2025 rodeo, Fowler was honored before both performances with a riderless horse ceremony. Her friend Stacy Harris was to lead Fowler’s Appaloosa, Dot, around the arena, carrying Fowler’s boots and cowgirl hat. Then an eight-rider drill team performed, each horse with a glitter C on its rump. The team had been practicing a “possum roll,” a new maneuver Fowler had added that year. “It’s going to be hard to stand in her shoes. She was bigger than life,” Sims said. “But we came together and divvied up her duties.”

A board of fifteen in 1952

According to the Expo Center, the grounds began to take shape in 1952. That year a fifteen-member board, backed by the Cashmere Chamber of Commerce and the Chelan County Granges, decided to start a county fair. HistoryLink dates Cashmere’s role as the fair’s home from 1953, crediting the same Grange and Chamber efforts. As county funding and commissioner support grew, the fairgrounds became the Chelan County Expo Center. Richard “Dick” Cochran, who lived from 1927 to 2018, sat on the fair board for 36 years and also served one year as Washington State Fair Board president. The fair marked its 70th anniversary in 2022 with the theme “A Fair to Remember.”

The rodeo queen program is much newer. Fowler had lobbied for it. The first pageant was held at the Tillicum Riders Clubhouse on the fairgrounds, and on Sunday, Nov. 12, Austyn Robinson was crowned the first Chelan County Fair and Rodeo queen, as the county reported in January 2024. Robinson was 20, a 2022 graduate of Cashmere High School who grew up on a family farm in Prosser. A panel of three judges, made up of former and current rodeo queens, chose her after a personal interview, a speech, a horsemanship pattern, and impromptu questions on horse health and the rodeo. She had wanted the title since her aunt won Miss Rodeo Washington in 2012, and she planned to carry it to parades on Cookie, her 12-year-old registered Paint. “As the rodeo queen, I really just want to be a good example for other people,” she said.

At the 2026 fair, Vida Russell won the queen competition on Saturday morning, rode into the arena that night to be introduced, and was set to be crowned on Sunday.