Morrow County Fair

The gates of the Morrow County Fairgrounds, on Hinton Creek along Oregon Route 74 in Heppner, opened at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 19, 2026, and nobody paid to pass through them. Each year the fair looks for a sponsor to cover daily admission. “We don’t want anything stopping people from coming through the gate,” co-manager Sue Gibbs told the East Oregonian. “It encourages people to come to the fair.” The 2026 theme, a nod to the national semiquincentennial, was “250 Years of Patriotic Dreams Come True.” The fair’s standing tagline is “The Perfect Place for Great Food, Family Fun and Entertainment.”

Grilled cheese and a parade on Main

The Tillamook Grilled Cheese Truck parked on the grounds from noon to 6 p.m. the first three days. Thursday evening, Murray’s Heppner Pharmacy poured its beer and wine tasting alongside the Morrow County Livestock Growers Dinner. Musically Unstable played that night, a band led by Joe Lindsay, a wheat farmer in the county. Food trucks and the Cardinal Cafe set up for the Friday evening concert.

Music ran all four days. Olivia Harms, from outside the county and by the East Oregonian’s account always a crowd draw, played the opening night’s Queen’s Welcome & Fair Board Appreciation Dinner. After her came Cody Bartels, Luke Basile, the Cory Peterson Band, Zac Grooms at the Saturday Livestock Growers luncheon, and Austin Miller on the last night. “We’ve brought in some bigger names before,” Gibbs said, “but the general public seems to want the local people.”

A caricature artist drew from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thursday and Friday. Eastern Oregon University brought back its GO STEM Mobile Maker Lab. “It’s hands-on science and stuff,” Gibbs said. “The kids love it.” On Saturday the parade rolled out at 10 a.m. in downtown Heppner, and that night the teen dance filled the Main Pavilion.

The rodeo was missing that week. By tradition it shares the fair’s days, and in 2025 the Northwest Pro Rodeo Association events took the Thursday through Saturday evenings. Construction of the new Morrow County Courthouse pushed the rodeos to separate dates in 2026: the Oregon Trail Pro Rodeo ran Aug. 27–29 and the Morrow County Jackpot Rodeo Aug. 30. Gibbs said the fair filled the gap with more entertainment. Sources give the fair’s dates differently. The East Oregonian reported Aug. 19–22. The OSU Extension Service listed Tuesday, Aug. 18, through Saturday, Aug. 22, and says the fair falls in the third week of August every year. The Oregon Fairs Association’s statewide calendar printed Aug. 12–15.

Sale day in Wilkinson Arena

Through the week, 4-H and FFA members show their animals in showmanship and conformation classes. Sheep, goats and cattle draw the most exhibitors and the most buyers. In 2025 the sheep and goat entries reached their limit before the fair opened. “We often said, ‘How many beds do you think we could get in here?,’” Gibbs said. “Well, we now know. Not another one.” The dairy classes drew more than 20 entries that year.

Some of those animals start out as loans. Threemile Canyon Farms Dairy and Morrow County Extension provide twelve 4-H members with Jersey heifer calves to raise and show at the fair. The calves then go back to the dairy to be bred for production. The Beef Northwest Youth Livestock Program supplies steers to 4-H and FFA students who lack the access or experience to show livestock otherwise.

The week ends in Wilkinson Arena on Saturday afternoon. The FFA awards program began at 1:15 p.m. in 2026, and the Youth Livestock Auction followed at 2 p.m. The Morrow County Livestock Growers put on the sale. At the 2025 auction, 170 4-H and FFA members sold their animals for a total of $1,146,244.46. “You see the smiles, the congratulations, the hard work being paid off,” Gibbs said.

A queen after ten years

In 2025, for the first time in ten years, the fair and the Oregon Trail Pro Rodeo had a queen. She was KC Anderson of Heppner, 16, the daughter of Colin and Erin Anderson, about to start her sophomore year at Heppner Jr/Sr High School. She signed posters at the Queen’s Welcome Dinner. “She is just doing an amazing job,” Gibbs said. “She just glows.” In 2026 Anderson returned as Fair & Rodeo Queen for a second time. The fair’s own page says “it takes one heck of an individual to dedicate countless hours and many miles of travel” to represent the county around the state.

The 2025 theme was “Back to our Roots in Cowboy Boots.” That year the fair also offered art competitions, community booths and a comedy magic show. “It’s a place to come together and just be together as a community,” Gibbs said. “For a really tiny town, we really put on a good show.” Heppner counted 1,187 people in the 2020 census.

The fair’s mission statement speaks of the traditions of “both ends of the county,” and getting there from the north end is a long drive. In 2025 the Loop, Morrow County’s public transit, added a 3 to 10 p.m. route on Thursday and Friday. It started and ended in Boardman and connected through Ione, Lexington and Heppner. “Historically, attendance has been from South County,” transit manager Steven Davis said.

From the city park to Hinton Creek

Morrow County was created from Umatilla County in 1885 and named for state legislator Jackson L. Morrow. According to the Morrow County ORGenWeb timeline, Morrow and Henry Heppner had opened the town’s first store in 1872. The same timeline records a Fair Building constructed in Heppner in 1889.

The first Morrow County Fair was held in 1912, at what is now the city park on North Main Street, with Wallace Smead as fair manager. The ORGenWeb timeline lists a “First North Morrow County Fair” in 1921. The rodeo was organized in 1922 under manager L.V. Gentry, and the timeline calls that year’s event the first official Heppner Rodeo.

For years afterward the fair was held only intermittently. In the 1930s the ground that would become its home held a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. A county history sign says the U.S. Army Engineers first set the camp up at Tupper and then moved it to Heppner, “where the Rodeo grounds are now.” The ORGenWeb timeline dates the Heppner camp to 1936. About 200 young men worked there on conservation and flood control, in a town where the Great Flood of 1903 had killed a quarter of the population. Many of them stayed in the area after the project ended, about 1940.

By then the fair had settled in. It became an annual event in 1939, when it moved to the present rodeo-fair grounds on Hinton Creek. Those are the same gates that opened at 10 a.m. in August 2026.