Jefferson County Fair

The Jefferson County Fair & Rodeo fills the county event complex on Fairgrounds Road, in the heart of Madras, during the last full week of July. The grounds cover 50-plus acres. Twenty buildings and barns stand in a park-like setting and enclose more than 100,000 square feet. An RV park of 65 spaces with a dog park adjoins them. The fair is the county’s largest annual event, and admission is free. The 2026 fair ran July 22 to 25 under the slogan “Red, White & Blue this Fair is for YOU.”

The grounds on Fairgrounds Road

The rodeo runs on the fair’s Friday and Saturday nights and is sanctioned by the NPRA. Tickets are sold at the door, the gate opens at 6 p.m., and the show starts at 7. In the barns, 4-H and FFA members show their livestock projects and sell them at the close of the fair. Dan Comingore, chair of the fair board, calls those livestock events “the foundation of most fairs across the country.”

Across the grounds in 2026 there were Scales & Tails shows with lizards, snakes and dragons that visitors could handle. Eleven live bands played. There were also a Walk on Water attraction, Food of the World vendors, and exhibits from the Children’s Museum of Central Oregon. Face painters, camel rides, axe throwing and knocker balls filled the open ground. The 541 Bounce Experience set up waterslides, bounce houses, themed obstacle courses, a Jellyball Battle Arena and movies, with tickets bought ahead. In 2013 Tony Ahern of the Madras Pioneer described the fair this way: “the laughter of kids, the flash of the carnival and the moos of the champion steers … all under the aroma of that great American invention known as ‘fair food.’”

The fair week is a small share of the grounds’ year. The complex hosts about 200 events annually. In 2024 it counted 100,000 visitors, and about a third of them came for the fair. In the weeks after the 2026 fair, the complex held a medieval Coronet Tournament and Cowdeo, a kids’ rodeo in the Corwin Arena. On weekdays the arena is open to riders for $5 each.

A summer without a carnival

The carnival Ahern described was missing in 2026. According to event complex manager Bart Platt, in June the ride company, Paul Maurer Shows, said it could not fully staff the fair. Comingore wrote that losing the carnival a month before opening was the board’s biggest unexpected problem that year. He listed the ordinary hazards: “loose livestock in the middle of the night, flooding in the café kitchen, vendor placement issues, fires and smoke.”

The two published accounts of the money differ. Comingore wrote in the Madras Pioneer that the complex lost nearly $100,000 in revenue from carnival, food-vendor and alcohol sources. He said the loss forced the board to cancel events planned for the fall. Central Oregon Daily News reported a preliminary county figure: $129,000 in revenue against costs of about $143,000, a shortfall of $14,000. It also reported a new sponsorship record of $60,000 and noted that wildfire smoke had hurt attendance. Some local vendors stepped in to help.

Many fairgoers wrote to the board that they had not missed the rides. One wrote: “We realize that SOME of the vendors did not make as much money, but not having the distraction of a carnival was so nice.” Another urged the board to keep the fair carnival-free, saying the rides take away from “open class, livestock exhibition, musical performances.” Comingore answered that the fair’s revenue pays for building exteriors, HVAC systems, roads, arenas and equipment. The board has said it will put on a 2027 fair but has published no dates.

A fish fry and a fair that never was

Madras first tried to hold a fair in the summer of 1913, two years after the railroad reached the basin. A group of residents petitioned the city council for a fairgrounds. The council agreed but could not deed land to a group that was not a legal entity. Robert Rea stepped in. He and his brothers, from the Portland area, had opened the Madras Townsite Co. in 1904. Rea offered a 40-acre tract north and west of the Madras Hotel, at Fifth and D streets, and the mortgage on it passed to E.L. Milner on behalf of the fairground. Howard Turner, O.A. Pearce, Turk Irving and C.E. Roush sat on the fair organization. The fair was set for October 16, 17 and 18, a week before the Crook County Fair.

Full-page ads promoted it in July, but by September they had stopped, and no fair was held in October. “I have no idea why,” Ahern wrote a century later. The paper’s issues through August are missing.

Madras held a Fish Fry instead, starting in 1914, on the Deschutes River near Warm Springs. Irving, Turner and Austin Culp went to the river days ahead and caught, in Ahern’s words, “literally, about a ton of fish.” In 1926 more than 1,200 people came to eat, hear speeches and watch boxing, with Model Ts parked over acres. The Fish Fry faded in the early 1930s.

In 1931 crews built a makeshift fairgrounds southeast of the elementary school. The first Jefferson County Fair opened that September with a full 120 horses. Schools closed for two days. The program had a rodeo, horse racing, boxing, a parade and games for children. Exhibits were shown in the old community center, which stood where the county annex is now, across Sixth Street from the old courthouse, and served as a USO building during the war. World War II canceled a couple of fairs, so the 2013 fair was counted as the 80th.

From the grade school to the south end of town

The accounts give different dates for the move to the present site. The Madras Pioneer reported in 2026 that the buildings were moved there in 1960. Ahern placed it in the mid-1960s. He described a land swap: the school district had outgrown its space during the growth brought by dam construction, and it held land on the south end of town. The swap gave the district the old fairgrounds beside the grade school and gave the county the new grounds to the south. Ahern wrote that the new arena was especially impressive. The Hagar twins, of Hee Haw, played the rodeo dance there in 1974.

Helen Houts began working at the fair in 1970. She and Jodi Eagan organized a 4-H modeling club in which girls from about age 9 through high school made their own clothes. She later served as superintendent of vendors. From 1982 to 1997 she was the fairgrounds office secretary under Floyd Bauer. She worked mornings there and afternoons at the nursery she and her husband ran. Because the budget was tight, she and Bauer weeded the flower beds themselves. “We had a big window that looked over into the arena, so we got to watch all of the horse activities whenever we wanted to,” she said of the office upstairs in the arena building. The office was later moved to a trailer. In 2019, at 79, she was the fair’s grand marshal and rode in the parade in a Model-T.

Brian Crow came from concert and music-festival work and became fair coordinator in 2016, three weeks before the fair opened. “This is literally my first rodeo,” he said. A picnic pavilion was built that first year. A show barn was under construction when he left in 2022. By his account, the 2021 fair was the largest in county history despite the pandemic.

A homestead on telephone-pole skids

In the northwest corner of the grounds stand an old homestead and a school from Opal City. In early June 2026 a third building was moved beside them on telephone-pole skids: the Glover house, first built in 1906. Glover had bought the land near Grandview from Charles and Murtle Buchanan for $640. The house began as one room and grew as the family grew. “They maybe built a small kitchen, bedroom area, and then expanded next year after a good crop,” said John McCloskey, a former fair board member. The Glovers had left by the 1920s. The house is thought to have stood empty from the 1950s or 1960s, worn by snow, wind, heat and vandals.

The property now belongs to Portland General Electric and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. In 2019 the house was catalogued and taken apart for the High Desert Museum, but that plan fell through for lack of funds. The fair board took on the project. “We on the board said, ‘That’s really kind of a neat piece of our history in this county,’” McCloskey said. “’If we can do anything to save it, we will.’”

The house is being rebuilt as two units visitors can enter, focused on the original structure without the later additions, and some rotted exterior wood is being replaced. The interior is expected to be finished and furnished in about a year from June 2026. Jim Carroll of the Jefferson County Historical Society said the house “portrays what life was like during the Homestead Act.”