Kittitas County Fair

Under Craig’s Hill

The Kittitas County Fair runs five days over Labor Day weekend, Thursday through Monday, on the county fairgrounds in Ellensburg. The 2026 fair ran September 3 through 7. The grounds sit against Craig’s Hill, an alluvial bank fifty to sixty feet high that forms a natural amphitheater for the rodeo arena below. The Ellensburg Rodeo runs in that arena alongside the fair, before a covered wooden grandstand facing north. The Fairgrounds Historic District is on both the Washington State and National Registers of Historic Places, and the county finished a $3.5 million renovation of its older buildings in 2001.

Behind the grandstand, two original wood-frame exhibition halls face a row of three livestock barns across a broad green. Most of the buildings went up in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. They keep their gable roofs, bracketed eaves, ridge ventilators, rustic drop siding, and paint of barn red with white trim. Inside the three early barns the framing is long, clear-grained fir. Early photographs show that green as the fair’s first midway, and Wilson Creek runs beneath it in a straightened channel. The larger carnival rides now stand to the west among the maples of the city’s Memorial Park. Since 2021 they have come from Paul Maurer Shows, which brought a new ride called the Freak Out to its first Ellensburg fair.

The fair calls itself “a good old-fashioned county fair” with games, contests, judged exhibits, and “an abundance of livestock.” Much of that is the work of county youth in 4-H, FFA, and Grange. Baking entries are judged and given ribbons by score. On Friday the youth Livestock Show and Market Sale fills Bloom Pavilion, an indoor riding arena built in 1978. The 2026 sale raised over $700,000, which the fair reports as the largest in its history, and the fair says proceeds often pay for college.

At the base of Craig’s Hill, a wood-fenced enclosure holds Frontier Village, a cluster of pioneer buildings moved in from around the Kittitas Valley. Fair Board members envisioned it in the early 1980s as an authentic setting for fairgoers. Near the hill the Yakama Nation keeps its encampment. In the fair’s early years Yakama families camped in a “teepee village” in Memorial Park, and the village now stands farther east and north. Each year the tribe makes its entrance on Craig’s Hill during the rodeo’s opening ceremonies.

The fair opens Thursday with a ceremony honoring the Farm Family of the Year. In 2026 that was the Riegal family. It closes Monday at 6 p.m. Labor Day admission is free, and the day brings the Mutton Bustin’ finals and the Bale Bucking Contest.

Mud, cats, and three knives

Rain soaked the 2026 fair over the weekend, and the sun came back for Monday, the Ellensburg Daily Record reported. At Sunday’s rodeo, Justin Dellinger of Ellensburg, in his fifth year at the wild cow milking, felt the rope slip through his hands and went down. He came out with mud from the bottom of his right boot to his shoulder. “It’s muddy out there,” he said.

The same Sunday, the 4-H cat costume contest packed a small room in the Heritage Center. Donna Kirckoff judged the decorated kennels in a sweater that read “MY CAT IS A NATIONAL TREASURE.” She gave the audience her customary warning: if anyone yells “Door!”, close the door, so no loose cat makes a dash for the fairgrounds. There had been a close call the year before. Jensen Fleming came as a diver in mask and snorkel, with his domestic shorthair Bells as a clown fish. “My cat and I are ‘Finding Nemo,’” he said. Emery Grieb was a vampire and her cat Cups a bat. One cat went as a soldier, to suit its name, War Crimes. Juliara Carvo won Judge’s Choice for a kennel done up as the Kitty Cat Candy Cafe, dressed as Batman with her cat Gretta as Robin. “I won!” she said in a hushed scream to the 4-H’er beside her. Back at her kennel she told her cat, “Good boy.”

The weather served Jennifer Hunter, who makes the drive from her store in Yakima to sell Fresh Start Candles, among them a lavender-and-vanilla candle in a purple-and-white ombré. “People running and hiding from the rain have definitely helped us,” she said. Lynn Britton of Kent, marking her 50th year of attending rodeos, had seen her first one in her hometown of Ellensburg and came back “for the parties.” Ellensburg High School cheerleaders worked the grounds selling pink bandanas for the rodeo’s “Tough Enough to Wear Pink” Day. Asked for her favorite ride, Harper Bononcini named the Freak Out. “My stomach dropped.”

On Monday, juggler Paul Isaac kept three knives in the air while cracking jokes, and Tinned Fish, a strings band, played in Frontier Village.

A fifteen-pound beet at Leonard’s Bridge

According to HistoryLink, the first Kittitas County Fair ran three days, September 30 to October 2, 1885. The county itself had been established only two years before. The fair was one part of the celebrations for a reunion of 18 veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union Army in the Civil War, hosted by Ellensburg’s James Parsons Post, Number 11. It was held near Leonard’s Bridge over the Yakima River, a spot HistoryLink placed in 2005 at Exit 106 on I-90, the exit travelers from Seattle take for the fair today. The fair’s verse history, written by Edward R. Cook in 1999, spells it Leonhard’s bridge and puts the fair “in a grove, one mile from town.” Kittitas County’s own page gives a different year: it says the first fair was held on the outskirts of Ellensburg in 1886.

Samuel T. Sterling served as secretary and J. L. Brown as superintendent, and admission was $1.00. In a 1972 Daily Record article, valley historian Leta May Smith described the preparations: “Ranchers and townsmen offered to help. All working together, the ground was cleared of brush, the uneven part was smoothed, a fine racetrack was built ... tables were erected in the shade of the trees and a few benches placed in a row for seats was a grandstand.”

Those tables held grapes, apples, wine, pickles, and preserves. They also held a red beet weighing 15 pounds, which one fairgoer called “fine to look at but no good to eat.” Women showed knitting, tatting, embroidery, and hair work, the wreaths, crosses, and chains made from human hair. Mrs. C. W. Stuart entered ornamental hair work in chains. There were hogs, sheep, cattle, chickens, and horses, along with foot races and horse races, a greased pole, and a greased pig. The old soldiers demonstrated bugle calls and kept the grounds tidy. On the last night the county held a ball at Johnson House downtown. By Cook’s account, the event lost money.

Store windows, a tent, a woolen mill

For years afterward the fair was held only intermittently, in HistoryLink’s account, and the National Register nomination calls its beginnings “sporadic,” with informal events through the 1890s. In 1906 it was a downtown street fair, with exhibits in storefront windows. Cook dates the “First Annual Kittitas County Fair” to 1912, still without grounds of its own. In 1914 a huge tent held the exhibits, and games and races ran at the old ball park.

In 1915 a Harvest Festival took the fair’s place. Fifty local businesses set out to feed everyone on a ton of meat, some bread, and more. They ran out and had to buy food from every store in town. “The businessmen laughed at their mistake,” Cook wrote, “as their wallets shed a tear.” World War One canceled the fair from 1917 through 1919. From 1920 through 1922 the displays went into an old brick woolen mill next to downtown, with a carnival set up in the streets. Cook says the mill became the Boise-Cascade building.

June 14, 1923

West of town near Thorp, ranchers had begun holding informal “Sunday rodeos” that drew hundreds of spectators. Kittitas Valley rancher Ben Ferguson recalled how his family started one: “(We) had all them horses and, my brother and a couple of friends put on a rodeo. … They got a wagon load of poles and made the corral and made the arena (and) chutes.” Their success showed that a rodeo could become a yearly part of the fair.

Leonard Davis, the county’s first extension agent, began pressing for permanent grounds in 1922, and newspaper editor Clifford Kaynor joined him. State law would not let counties buy land, so Senator McCauley introduced a bill to allow it. The Daily Record reported in 2019 that in April 1923 the county commissioners budgeted $10,000 for 18 acres, an arena, and bleachers. The 2016 county master plan instead credits a $10,000 infusion from the state. The tract lay just outside the city limits and held sagebrush and a winding, flood-prone creek. Native peoples reportedly once corralled and pastured horses there during their annual gatherings. Cook calls it Shwoowtookpama, the spot beneath the hill.

On June 14, 1923, by Cook’s account, every business and office in the county closed. Local cattleman Lou Richards organized the crews, and five hundred men arrived with over two hundred horses and “Fresno” scrapers. They fenced the grounds, moved Wilson Creek closer to the hill, graded the race track, and built bridges, and the women provided the feast. A quarter-mile driveway was cut along the face of Craig’s Hill, and it is still partly used as an entry into the arena. County engineer W. T. Bowman laid out the arena, oval, and exhibit grounds in the plan the fairgrounds still follow. Richards went on to direct the rodeo arena.

The first fair on the new grounds ran September 13 through 15, 1923, with a Wild West Rodeo as its main attraction, and over 500 would-be spectators were turned away for lack of room. Game warden Frank Bryant, who spoke Chinook Jargon, arranged for the Yakama to attend, and 150 tribal members came. By 1937 more than 20 tribes were represented. The south and west grandstands were finished in 1927. During World War Two, gas shortages called off the rodeo. In its place the Ellensburg Rodeo Posse, the state’s first chartered rodeo posse, held a horse show and pageant on the fairgrounds. Bryant stayed with the rodeo into the 1940s and worked with the Yakamas to make sure they came back for the first event after the war, in 1945.