Jackson County Fair

From Interstate 5 at Exit 33, the road runs east, then left onto Peninger Road and past the Family Fun Center to the fairgrounds on the right. This is The Expo, at 21 Peninger Road, across the interstate from the town of Central Point. Each July it holds the Jackson County Fair. The 2026 fair ran from Tuesday, July 14, to Sunday, July 19, under the banner “Stars, Stripes, and Summer Nights.” Opening-day admission was $2.50, set to mark America’s 250th birthday and sponsored by the Grange Co-op. The Oregon Encyclopedia describes the Co-op as a Central Point farm supply store from the 1930s whose grain elevator is a town landmark.

The Expo does not run on property taxes. Its own pages call it an enterprise fund of Jackson County that pays its way through events such as the fair and through renting out its buildings.

Midway, amphitheater, and barns

The midway offers rides, games, and carnival food. An unlimited-ride wristband covers the rides. Writing about the 2016 fair, the Jacksonville Review listed gentle kiddie rides, family rides, and “over-the-top twisters,” with midway games that ran from Water Races to Balloon Dart and basketball. In 2021 the carnival had its best fair in the history of Paul Maurer Shows, according to Expo director Helen Funk.

In the evenings, music comes from the Bi-Mart Amphitheater. Lawn seats for the headline concerts come with fair admission. On the 2026 bill, opening night was Challenge of Champions bull riding. Ian Munsick played Wednesday at 7:00 p.m., and Chris Young played Thursday. Friday brought the Real McCoy, DJ Skribble, and C & C Music Factory, and La Original Banda El Limon closed Saturday night. Sunday has no headliner. That day the gates are free to everyone, courtesy of Ray’s Food Place, and children 12 and under get in free every day through the West Family Foundation. Grounds programs in 2026 included Expo Got Talent and the creative arts exhibits.

The barns open before the rest of the fair. In 2026, 4-H at the County Fair began Friday, July 10, four days before the public gates, with livestock shows and creative arts exhibits. The 2021 numbers give a sense of its size. 4-H and FFA students showed more than 100 steers and 165 pigs, and the auction brought in record sales of more than $2.4 million. The Open Goat show drew a record 285 goats for its Sunday competition. The Junior Livestock Auction sells the youth market animals. Alongside it, the Jacksonville Review listed exhibits in photography, foods, expressive arts, horticulture, and technology. Only service animals are allowed on the grounds. Animals not entered in the fair are kept out of the livestock barns because, the fair says, livestock may react “defensively or aggressively” to dogs.

The fair’s paid lots sit along Peninger Road. Free parking is at the Crater High School football field and the Back 40 on Gebhard Road. Free shuttle buses run a loop from there to the gates every 10 to 15 minutes.

Pig races, camels, and steak suppers

The fair’s sideshows change from year to year. Dennis Powers, writing for Southern Oregon Past & Present, counted some 85,000 people at the six-day fair in 2012. That year’s events ranged “from livestock judging to beer gardens, from Go-Kart races to steak suppers,” along with sprint car races. In 2013 the grounds held a pirate parrot show, a strolling robot, camel rides, hypnotists, sheep riding, motocross, and a monster-truck show, besides the rodeo and bull riding. Attendance that year dipped to 78,000.

The 2016 fair added the Great American Pig Racing show, with pig trivia and pig cheerleaders, and a Sunday ranch rodeo for cowboys from working ranches. Its events were stock horse, calf branding, ranch sorting, calf roping, ranch doctoring, and wild cow milking. The Medford First Church of the Nazarene held a Sunday service in the amphitheater. Bicyclists could ride the Bear Creek Greenway to the fair and leave their bikes with a staffed valet.

The 2021 fair followed a year without one. Almost 70,000 people came through the gates in five days. Food vendors took in 75 percent more than in 2019, and beverage sales rose 61 percent. “Some of the reasons food and beverage sales rallied so well could be because we have missed our traditional fair food AND fair goers liked being able to go to the fair concerts for FREE each night,” Funk said.

A grape and a dollar apple

Powers dates the fair to October 1859. That year Oregon became a state, and Jacksonville held an “Agricultural Show,” which he calls the first Jackson County Fair. He judges it the longest-running county fair in Oregon. He supposes the first show “more than likely relied on baked goods, canned goods, and some livestock.” A history compiled by Dr. Willard Brown for the Rogue Valley Winegrowers Association records one entry. John Beeson of Talent showed his “California grape” at that first fair and won a blue ribbon. The grape was probably a Mission, grown from cuttings supplied by the photographer Peter Britt, who had planted the valley’s first vineyard at his Jacksonville home.

A 1927 editorial by B. F. Irvine of the Portland Oregon Journal, reprinted in the Medford Mail Tribune, gives a different date. It places the original fair at Jacksonville “in the early ‘60s, in the days of the gold mining excitement,” when Jackson County was the most populous county in the state. By Irvine’s account, the first apples grown in Oregon were shown at that fair, and the miners bought them at a dollar an apple. The apples came from an orchard near Table Rock, the first set out in Southern Oregon. The Jackson County Fair Association was organized in 1872.

Speedway years in Medford

According to Powers, the first fairgrounds stood on south Oakdale in Medford. The city and county complained that the fair’s automobile races endangered the airfield next door. In 1922 the fair moved to the site where the Medford Armory now stands. A Medford man, J. E. Mason, described the new grounds to a Portland paper in January 1922. The county had levied a one-mill tax for a year and raised $40,000. A California expert had laid out an automobile speedway, with a half-mile horse track inside its circle and an aviation landing field inside the track. Mason said there was hope of putting the fair on the same racing circuit as the drivers of Southern California. By 1927, the Mail Tribune valued the fairgrounds near Medford at $110,000.

Powers calls the 1920s the fair’s heyday, a place for the well-dressed to be seen. Races were run in autos, airplanes, and on horseback. Well-known drivers raced Duesenbergs, Millers, and overhead-valve Fords, and one year Barney Oldfield came to wave the checkered flag.

Into the early 1970s, commercial building along I-5 crowded the Medford grounds and left no room for rodeo, equestrian, and show-horse events. Jackson County sold the property in 1974 and moved the fair to its present site at The Expo, which Powers puts at 200 acres. In 1998 the Red and Eleanor Isola Memorial Fund gave $700,000 for a 37,000-square-foot equestrian arena with 1,500 seats. Powers reports that the Isola Memorial Arena became the second-largest covered arena in the West, after one in Reno.

The fair marked its 150th year in 2009 with displays of how things had changed. A rotary television stood beside a plasma flat screen, and a rotary-dial phone sat next to an iPhone. Cars and trucks were shown from every decade of the twentieth century.