Coos County Fair & Rodeo

The midway at the Coos County Fairgrounds in Myrtle Point opens at noon. The rides come from Rainier Entertainment and run until around 10 or 11 at night. About 1 o’clock each afternoon the music starts on the midway stage. “We have some of the best selection of local entertainments down on our midway stage,” Brad Burnette, chairman of the fair board, told KCBY during the 2026 fair, which the station counted as the 114th year. The fair is normally held the fourth week of July on the grounds off Fourth Street. Its own list of attractions runs to carnival rides, a pie eating contest, fair food, vendors, livestock, art exhibits, trains and a museum, with bands, dancers and other regional entertainers through the week and lawnmower races on Tuesday night in the arena.

Burnette joined the board because his children enjoy what the fair offers. He gave The World his account of why people come back in 2024: “A lot of it is tradition – being able to come out and have that favorite fair food that you have always had, or go on your favorite carnival ride.”

Barns, pies, and a Lego build

The fair opens its exhibits to all ages. In the open class, people show livestock, floral work, land products, culinary entries, needlework, photography, and arts and crafts. The 2025 handbook lists dairy and beef cattle, swine, sheep, goats, poultry, rabbits and cavies, llamas, exotics and horses in the animal barns. The land products department also takes beers, wines, liqueurs and cordials. The same book lists a set of “fun classes”: a Flea Market Flip, Steampunk, a Lego Build, apple pie, a Mason Jar Revival, fresh salsa, cinnamon buns, blueberry muffins, a fair banner quilt, yard art, the largest vegetable or fruit, and a Veggie Creature.

Many fairgoers come to watch the 4-H and FFA auction animal programs. Youth in grades 5 through 12 raise cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, goats, llamas and rabbits and bring them to the fair. In the 2025 schedule the 4-H and FFA livestock auction was held Saturday at 1 p.m. “We have over 300 4-H families, and most of them camp right here on the grounds,” Burnette said in 2024. Much of that camping is on Leep’s Field. The Leep family had let the fair use the field for more than 60 years before donating the land to the fair in 2024. “We were just blown away,” Burnette said. “If we were to have lost this a lot of these kids and families wouldn’t be able to here and be a part of this.”

The 2025 fair opened at 10 a.m. on Tuesday at the flagpole south of the Davenport Building. The program included a ribbon cutting, a 21-gun salute by the Myrtle Point VFW, the flag salute and the national anthem. The grand marshals that year were Mildred Bryant Peterson and Beverly Peterson Quackenbush, and they led the Saturday parade at 10 a.m. The year before, the grand marshal was Rhonda Altenbach. Her years in 4-H and at the Coos County Fair led to her business as a horse trainer, and she has given riding lessons to hundreds of local youth and adults.

The arena and its bleachers

Jason Wilson, the fair’s volunteer horse superintendent, described the rodeo in written testimony to the Oregon Legislature in 2025 as “the climax of this annual event.” It runs two nights at the end of the week in the main arena. Wilson wrote that the bleachers “are packed with spectators who love experiencing the tradition, history, and competition.” The 2025 schedule had the rodeo starting at 6 p.m. and put a kids’ pig scramble in the middle of the rodeo as the halftime show.

The fair names a rodeo court each year. In 2024 the queen was Paige Speakman, 18, a Southwestern Oregon Community College student, and the princess was Breanna Tolman, 14, of Bridge. “They are doing a great job representing us, traveling around the state, going to different rodeos and promoting our fair,” Burnette said. The 2026 court is Queen Bailey Wallack and Princess Kindley De Sousa.

The arena has not always looked as it does now. Wilson wrote that “the constant winter rains and wind shorten the lifespan of any wooden or metal structure.” The turn-of-the-century grandstands were declared beyond repair and torn down in the early 1990s because there was no money to preserve them. Since then a small group of volunteers has raised funds to replace the bleachers, the bucking and roping chutes, fencing, corrals and the announcer’s booth. They also built a 400-foot wooden fence between the livestock and the fairgoers and re-roofed two of the three horse barns. When Wilson testified, they were building a new arena, which they hoped to cover, and an amphitheater beside the rodeo grounds. In summer the arena is in use every day by horse 4-H clubs, junior rodeo, bull riding and team roping promoters, and rodeo royalty competitors.

A mill model above the Bunny Barn

The Fairgrounds Museum is on the top floor of the old Commercial Building. The 2025 handbook directs visitors “Above the Bunny Barn!” and advertises an expanded train display, open daily during the fair. The museum began with one object. The Coos County Logging Museum had agreed to take a model of the Gardiner Large Log Mill from the Umpqua Discovery Center in Reedsport. The model is 30 feet long, and the Logging Museum needed a large room for it, so its representatives approached the fair board. Within a few months the upstairs was cleaned, painted and upgraded, and the display was ready for the 2005 fair. According to the museum, the mill it shows was operating in Gardiner as recently as 1989.

The museum calls itself a “display museum.” Its exhibits come on loan from individuals, schools, businesses and most of the museums in the county. One exhibit covers Coos County schools from the 1850s into the 1930s. It includes schoolwork by Marshfield pupils that was sent to the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland in 1905, and more than 1,000 photographs. In 2007 the museum displayed early Sanborn maps of Coquille and Myrtle Point beside period photographs. That third summer, more than 5,000 people came through what the museum describes as its “huge barn style doors.” Steve Means was the director then.

Across the grounds stands the Oaks Pavilion, which The World in 2001 said had held summertime dances and displays since the fair began. It started as an open-air dance floor. Walls and a roof of open beams were added over the years, and in the 1960s the Lions Club closed the building in. After that it held regular dances and, for many years, high school basketball games. Over time the building fell into disrepair. Ron Crook took over as fair manager in 1997 and proposed rebuilding it as a year-round hall with a kitchen. The work took three phases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, and many hours of volunteer labor. The pavilion was rededicated in November 2001, and former state legislators Sam Dement of Myrtle Point and Walt Schroeder of Gold Beach were invited to speak about its history. “That building, being one of the oldest on the grounds, there’s been so many stories I’ve heard all my life,” Crook said. Since the renovation it has been used for proms, weddings and seminars.

From Dixon Grove to the bucking mules

Curt Beckham’s 1985 book Myrtle Point Beginnings, as indexed by Robyn Greenlund, traces the fair to a 1911 stock show at Dixon Grove. In 1893 the same grove had been the site of the celebrations for the first trains to reach Myrtle Point. The next year the Coos and Curry Fair Association bought land for a fairground from P.M. Cole and R.C. Dement, and the Coos & Curry County Fair held its first fair there in 1912. Dement was the association’s first president. J.L. Knight was vice president, L.A. Roberts secretary and T.D. Guerin treasurer, and A.E. Adelsperger, Dr. M.O. Stemmler and O.J. Seeley sat on the board. In 1913 the city decorated its streets for the fair. A photograph from about 1915 shows the grandstand and a house on Fourth Street.

Around 1920 the fair offered airplane rides. Harold Adams, who had learned to fly in the Army in Texas during the First World War, flew a plane at the fairgrounds during the fair. In 1924 the fair held its first rodeo, with bucking horses, bulls and mules. In 1934 the association became the Coos County Fair Association. A Loggers Shodeo was added in 1963. Jim Howe and Jim Jenkins served as managers before Harold Clarno, who ran the fair for 23 years; the index dates his entry to about 1970.

In 2012 the fair marked its 100th year under the theme “A Century of Fun for Everyone.” Office manager Debbie James arranged for the 100th person through each pay gate each day to get in free. The rodeo opened Friday with kids’ events, a truck and tractor pull filled Saturday night, and the parade stepped off Saturday at 10 a.m. On the Sunday before opening, the Burton Prairie Wranglers held their yearly ice cream social while their horses went through veterinary checks. A World photographer recorded Hunter Layton, 7, getting the chocolate syrup just right on his ice cream.