Hood River County Fair

At the 2026 Hood River County Fair the gates opened at 11:00 in the morning and closed at 11:00 at night. On Saturday, July 25, the Main Stage stood on the football field. At 6:15 pm the opening act was Cascade High, a Hood River band of Al Hare, Matt McCravey, and Nolan Hare. The fair’s announcement says the three had played together for years and formally made themselves a band only the year before. At 8:15 the country band BlackHawk followed. Henry Paul, its co-founder and lead vocalist, has described the band’s beginning this way: “We were three guys whose goal was to approach country with smart songs and unique harmonies for people who may not automatically like country.” The night before, Los Bondadosos and Grupo Maravilla de Robin Revilla took the same field from 6:30. Both concerts came with paid fair admission.

The grounds lie at 3020 Wyeast Road, outside Hood River, and the fair keeps its mailing address in Odell. The Hood River County Fair Board runs the place. Its buildings carry plain names: the Community Building, the Summit Building, and the Floral Building. Beside them are an outdoor arena and a closed barn that serves as an indoor arena. For the rest of the year the grounds hold banquets, weddings, reunions, RV rallies, and stored vehicles. On October 24 and 25, 2026, the Harvest Craft Show fills the buildings. The 2027 fair is set for July 28 through July 31.

Stingrays by the Floral Building

A newspaper account of the 2019 fair, held July 24 through 27, lists what a visitor met in an ordinary year: carnival rides on the midway, animals, and exhibits. The fair manager that year, Clara Rice, brought in an educational stingray exhibit near the Floral Building, where children could feed the fish. Face painters worked the park area. On the park stage a magic-and-balloon act called Twisty and Friends performed. “One of the things he does is he gets inside of a balloon — his whole body in a balloon setup,” Rice said. OMSI and WAAAM set up children’s displays in the Wy’east gyms, and WAAAM added a pedal car obstacle course and a glider contest.

That year’s music changed late. Tiranosa Del Norte had been booked for Friday at 7:30 pm on the Griffith Stage. The Thursday before the fair, Rice learned that the band members had not applied for visas in time to cross into the United States. Jesus Mendoza took the slot, and Banda Maguay followed at 9:30. “Banners were reprinted and I got all of those out to everybody right away to replace the other ones,” Rice said. On Saturday afternoon the ranch sorting competition ran in the Frank Herman Arena. Golf carts lent by Griffith Motors and Les Schwab carried people who needed help getting to the barns and back, about every half hour. Fair board members drove them. The fair allowed no alcohol, and no pets other than service animals.

A fair board appointed in 1919

The barns and the stage are the latest homes of a fair whose start is told two ways. The fairgrounds’ own history says the Hood River County Fair started in 1921 in downtown Hood River. On May 15, 1919, however, the Hood River Glacier ran the headline “First County Fair Date Is Announced.” The paper reported that a fair set for September had been made possible by an appropriation from the county court. On its last day, the paper said, children of the county schools would compete in cookery, garden products, and livestock at the annual industrial school fair, and the best exhibits would go straight to the state fair at Salem.

The county court had appointed three men to the fair board: C. E. McIntosh, A. W. Peters, and D. L. Pierson. Peters was elected president and also took charge of the cattle. Pierson became secretary-treasurer and handled the miscellaneous entries. The Glacier listed a superintendent for each department, among them swine, sheep, poultry, grain, horticulture, vegetables, farm machinery, and art.

Dairy calves and pear blight

Those school children had a place at the fair from the beginning. According to Dani Annala of the OSU Extension Service, writing in 2021, youth programs have run in Hood River since the Extension Service arrived in 1911. In the early years the county superintendent of schools coordinated the clubs. When Extension Agent Arch Marble arrived in 1929, he took on some of that work. The first clubs were in livestock. At the county 4-H club exhibit, twenty-three boys showed 28 head of dairy stock. Bob Nunamaker and Ralph Kirby then took their prize winners to the Oregon State Fair, the first time Hood River had made such an exhibit there.

In 1934 and 1935 the county agent visited the grade schools regularly to teach 4-H. The visits stopped when fire blight broke out in the pear orchards and the agent was needed there. Annala gives Marble’s reasoning: no one suggested the children mattered less than the trees, but the pear trees were extremely important to the children, and the blight could not wait. During the war, enrollment fell, but victory garden, cooking, and canning clubs did well. In 1942 Bill Alexander of Parkdale grew one of the top eight victory gardens in the United States. By the early 1950s, 71 adult leaders worked with children in 53 clubs.

Under the Wy’east grandstand

In 1953, by the Extension account, the fair board, the Extension Service, and the school board agreed to hold the county fair on the grounds of the new Wy’east High School. A combined grandstand and livestock barn went up on the athletic field, built for both the school and the fair. The fairgrounds history dates the fair’s move to the Wy’east school grounds to 1957. There, 4-H and FFA livestock were shown on the football field and penned beneath the grandstands, and the other exhibits filled the adjoining classrooms.

The fair kept growing at the school. In 1965, 4-H agent Gordon Cook counted 52 club gardens judged, 274 members taking part in the county fair, and 79 chosen for the state fair. In 1978, 4-H agent Jim Douglas added clubs in skiing, trail bike, and woodworking, while 107 members took sewing and 103 worked with horses. In 1982 the Community Building went up, followed by the other buildings, and that same year the fair moved to what is now the Hood River County Fairgrounds.

In July 2021 the Columbia Gorge News marked the fair’s hundredth year. The 4-H entries listed for judging at that fair, held July 21 through 24, were photography, baked goods, art, and livestock.