Klickitat County Fair

Saturday, from the parade to the steak dinner

On the Saturday of the 2026 Klickitat County Fair, August 15, parade entries gathered at Goldendale Primary School at 9 am and stepped off through downtown Goldendale at 10. By 11:45 the Parade of Champions had lined up on the fairgrounds. At 12:15 the Hay King and Grain King awards were presented in the Bill Conboy Arena. At 12:30 the rodeo began.

The rodeo is sanctioned by the Northwest Professional Rodeo Association. By its own account, the NPRA is the largest regional rodeo organization in the western United States and sanctions more than 40 rodeos a year in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, and California. At Goldendale the performances are included with fair admission. The Saturday and Sunday programs both feature Junior Barrel Racers from Klickitat County and the Merchant Wild Cow Milking Contest. Sunday adds rodeo entertainers. The Sunday slack runs at 7:30 am, before most visitors arrive. The rodeo has its own royalty. Natalie Schroder, queen of the Klickitat County Fair and Rodeo in 2020, kept the title through 2021 because Covid-19 limited travel that year. In October 2020 she rode as visiting royalty at the Broken Spur Rodeo.

The Phil Garner Memorial Steak Dinner was served at 4 pm in the Main Grandstands Cafeteria. It cost $20 and included an 8-ounce barbecued tri-tip, a baked potato, baked beans, green salad, and a dinner roll with butter. At 5 pm the market stock sale opened at the Eleanor Dooley Memorial Livestock Barn. At 9 pm the band Countryfied played Reno’s Stage by the beer garden. An hour later the barns closed to the public for the nightly animal welfare check, which falls at 10 pm every night of the fair.

Barns, rings, and the exhibit hall

The 2026 fair ran Thursday, August 13, through Sunday, August 16, under the theme “#Hashtags & Harvest Nights.” The Klickitat County Fair Board runs it. The gates open at 8 am. Admission is cash only, and there is an ATM on the grounds. The fairgrounds have four arenas, indoor and outdoor, and outdoor grandstands that seat about 980. Visitors who stay the weekend can camp on the grounds in an RV or tent. There is a dump station and restrooms with showers.

The open horse show starts on Wednesday, before the gates open to the general public. The livestock classes take up most of the following days: beef and dairy cattle; dairy, fiber, meat, and utility goats; sheep; swine; rabbits; poultry; and cavies. Showmanship classes are judged on Friday morning. At 1 pm that day, the All-Around Showmanship Contest brings together the winners from beef, dairy cattle, goats, sheep, swine, and horses.

The small animal barn has the lighter events. The swine department holds a costume class half an hour after the peewee showmanship ends. Saturday brings a Rabbit/Cavy Costume Contest, Small Animal Jeopardy, and rabbit and cavy agility. The goat ring offers a Dairy Goat Milking Contest, followed by costume, goat calling, and agility classes. Dogs compete all weekend in showmanship, obedience, agility, a Rally Obedience Dog Bowl, and, at 1 pm Sunday, a Dog Costume Class.

Horse and cattle work fills the Bill Conboy Arena. Ranch sorting starts Wednesday. Open and family penning run Thursday, and open branding runs Friday. The County Team Roping Event begins at 8:30 Saturday morning. Thursday evening opens with the Kick-Off BBQ from 5 to 7, with live music on Reno’s Stage, followed by a Cowboy Auction at 7:30. On Friday evening, the Joan Frey Indoor Arena holds an open Vegas-style archery shoot. Sign-in starts at 5:30, anyone may enter, and the entry fee is a donation. At 8 pm the new Rootbeer Garden held its first youth dance, with a live DJ.

The Exhibit Building opens at 9 each morning. It holds the county’s crafts, sewing, needlework, fiber arts, quilts, photography, fine art, ceramics, baking, food preservation, crops, horticulture, and flowers. On Sunday at 12:15 the animals pass once more in the Livestock Parade. At 3 pm the exhibitors gather for an ice cream social at Reno’s Stage, and the barns close to the public for haul-out.

A pavilion, a race course, and a high fence

The Hay King and Grain King contests go back to the fair’s beginnings. The winter of 1880–1881 was hard in Klickitat County and killed many sheep and cattle. To keep their herds fed through bad weather, many ranchers began planting hay and grain and storing it. By the early 1880s, most of the land between the Columbia hills and the Simcoe Mountains was under cultivation.

In 1881 a group of farmers and Goldendale business owners organized to put on a yearly agricultural fair. Paula Becker, writing for HistoryLink, gives the group’s name two ways. One essay calls it the Klickitat County Agricultural Society, and another calls it the Klickitat County Agricultural Association. The group bought a tract of land about a mile outside Goldendale. There they built an exhibition pavilion, a race course and grandstand, and stalls for stock, all surrounded by a high fence. The first fair was held there in the autumn of 1881, and residents considered it a great success.

A county history published in 1904 described what the settlers saw at that first fair: “The settlers of the county had their attention called for the first time to the importance of their county as a fruit country, when they saw displayed not only hardy varieties, but even the more delicate semi-tropical fruits, all perfect in form and development.” The same account noted that the wheat fields were “increasing year by year and it was evident that an outside market would soon be a necessity.”

A severe drought followed in 1882, but the fair continued each fall for several years and was held annually through the 1880s. A photograph of its grandstand from about 1890 survives in the collection credited as Early Klickitat Valley Days. In September 1909 the fair was started again but held only sporadically. It was revived once more in 1944. After 1949, the newly formed Klickitat County Livestock Association and the Klickitat County Fair Association worked together to present it.

Roland Linford “Bill” Hall brought his family from Utah to Klickitat County in 1950. His cemetery record says he was “integrally involved in the rodeo and Klickitat County Fair for many years.” He died in Goldendale in 1993 and is buried in Mount View Cemetery.

The Moses trophy

Before the long gap in the fair’s history ended, one Goldendale boy carried its name east. Kenneth Gunn Hinshaw began 4-H club work at age 10, while attending Goldendale grade schools. For four years he served as superintendent of livestock exhibits at the Klickitat County Fair. He also organized a junior livestock breeders association in the county and started a pictorial beef judging contest. In 1925 he was runner-up for the Moses trophy, given to the most outstanding 4-H leader in the United States. In 1926 he won it, competing against 610,000 4-H club boys and girls across the country. The Goldendale Sentinel first told the story in its Diamond Anniversary edition of July 1, 1954.

Hinshaw was then a student at Washington State College, majoring in agricultural journalism. Horace A. Moses, the New England manufacturer who donated the trophy, offered him a job in the East. Hinshaw declined and said he preferred to finish his studies at Pullman. In 1928, his senior year, Moses wrote again with a position in Hinshaw’s chosen field. Hinshaw accepted and joined The Co-operator, a magazine of the Eastern States Farmers Exchange in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he later became editor-in-chief. His obituary, published in June 1990, lists his work on Goldendale’s Lions Club, Chamber of Commerce, and Observatory Corporation. He also arranged $5,000 in matching funds for the restrooms and picnic kitchen at Ekone Park, built in the form of frontier blockhouses joined by a log stockade wall.

Letters of congratulation reached Hinshaw from across the country after the 1926 award. One came from a railroad executive: “Young man, we have been trying to advertise the Pacific Northwest for years, but your winning the Moses trophy did more than all we have done, put together.”