Mud Lake Fair

The covered eating area at the Mud Lake fairgrounds stands north of the grandstand. On the Friday night of the 2026 fair, two Rexburg junior high students, Sage Webb and Addy Clark, sat at the Ron’s Tire and Motorsports table flipping Arrowhead water bottles and laughing. Neither had been to the fair before. “It’s really small, and that is so good. That is fun,” Webb told a Jefferson Star correspondent. “It’s nice because there aren’t so many people and you can walk right up to the front of the line sometimes.” The rodeo was about 15 minutes off, and Clark knew what she was waiting for: “The barrel racing and the saddle bronc. I really like those two events.”

This is the Mud Lake Fair & Rodeo, held at 1400 E 1500 N in Terreton. Jefferson County puts on two fairs each August, this one and the Rigby Fair. In 2026 Mud Lake ran August 5 to 8, and Rigby followed August 10 to 15. The Jefferson Star counted the 2026 edition as the 78th. Sheriff’s deputies and ticket takers put the Friday night rodeo crowd at 500 to 600, and correspondent Paul Lambert judged that the facility would be hard pressed to fit 1,000.

Corn in a Cup and the Lady Lions grill

North of the arena, Lambert found something between a state-fair midway and a farmers market. Vendors line one side of the thoroughfare with beads and baubles, sunglasses and souvenirs. The food stands in 2026 were Farmboy Fry Barn, Hamer Hoagies, Lady Lions Burgers, Apple Nachos, Esquivel Family Diner and Corn in a Cup. Lambert described them as businesses “so small and personal that they take days off for family funerals. So local they can tell you whose field the fixins came from.”

Jefferson County Sheriff Sergeant Richard Lundberg was working the fair for the sixth season in a row that Friday. He had just finished a Lady Lions burger. “Onions and pickles and ketchup and mustard,” he said. “It doesn’t get any better than this.” He said most of the deputies in the department ask for this duty. “Vendors are local, stock contractors are local,” he said. “When you call for an ambulance it’s your neighbors. Field on fire? The fire department is your neighbors.”

Wesley Cordova, nearly 16, goes to West Jefferson High School and lives near Monteview. He was at the Corn in a Cup stand with his friend Luis Gonzalez. He finds the Eastern Idaho State Fair in Blackfoot a little too far away and a little too crowded. “You don’t get to be at a rodeo at home that much,” he said. “You just get to come out and have fun out here with all the people.”

Four days in August

The 2026 fair took the theme “America 250, Heritage to Harvest,” and Hoggan Rodeo Company served as grand marshal. Most of the program moves through the barns and the fair building by day and the arena by night.

On Thursday, August 6, swine judging for 4-H, FFA and open class began at 8:30 a.m., sheep at 11, and goats no earlier than 1:30. The fair building stayed locked from noon to 3 while judges worked. Reading in the Park ran under the park shelter in the morning. At 6 p.m. the parade set off from its lineup in the school parking lot. Entries in recent years have included horses, four-wheelers, bicycles and tricycles, church groups and civic clubs, each carrying a sign naming whom it represents. The Mud Lake Youth Rodeo began at 7:30 that evening.

On Friday, beef judging opened at 9 a.m. The Idaho Rodeo series slack came at 10:30, and Round Robin Showmanship at 1 p.m. On Saturday the market livestock sale began at 1 p.m., and open-class exhibitors collected their premiums and their entries in the fair building. Both Friday and Saturday ended with the rodeo at 7:30 p.m.

Other evenings have been added around the fair. Before the 2023 fair, the West Jefferson Lady Lions and Lions Club put on Music in the Park at the fairgrounds, with a set by the “D 5 2 3s,” the school’s teacher band. The audience brought their own chairs and blankets. The same grounds hold horse pulls in June, and one was held on June 19, 2026.

The country around Terreton

The fair takes its name from a town and a wider district. Mud Lake, an incorporated city of about 320, sits on Highway 33 about forty-five minutes northwest of Idaho Falls, between Rexburg and Howe. The Mud Lake Historical Society keeps its museum on that highway, two miles west of Terreton. The lake itself lies about five miles northeast of town. Trish Petersen lives a mile from it, and in Idaho Magazine she wrote of peregrine falcons, sandhill cranes, swans, geese and ducks on the water. Her husband’s grandmother Mona told her many times, “When I moved here from Burton (near Rexburg) in 1960, I thought it was the end of the earth.”

White settlement came late. The Historical Society’s 2005 book Mud Lake Memories names Horace Jackett, who arrived in 1901, as the first permanent white settler. He was drawn by springs and ponds rising in what had been dry sagebrush. Geologists trace that water to irrigation on the Egin Bench, which sank and ran underground through lava crevices. By 1914 the low embankments failed, and the lake took back new farms. Dredges and Fresno scrapers then dug the canals that watered the alfalfa country around the fairgrounds.

In 1935 Pete and Fannie Kuharski built the Mud Lake Mercantile to draw the scattered settlements of Level, Monteview, Terreton, Owsley and Spring Lake together. The building was set at an angle on its lot so that everyone would feel welcome. Residents spoke of “going to Mud Lake” when they meant going to the Merc. The present building dates from 1959. Charlie Braun later gave it to the Historical Society, and Petersen dates the gift to 2007. The museum’s remodeled rooms opened during the week of August 7 to 11, 2012.

Fair managers as grand marshals

On August 16, 1956, the Rigby Star announced the “Seventh Annual Mud Lake Fair” for Thursday and Friday, August 23 and 24, at Terreton. Tom Mitchell was over-all chairman, and LeGrand Wadsworth led the men’s group. The same page reported that the 23rd annual county fair would open August 31 at Ririe, so the county already ran two fairs then. The newspaper’s count of seven in 1956 does not match the Jefferson Star’s count of 78 in 2026. The 2023 fair carried the theme “75 Years of Traditions.”

For that 2023 fair, the board named the past fair managers as grand marshals. Tom Mitchell and LeGrand Wadsworth headed the list, followed by Lavar McCrary, Joe Potter, Dale Cope, Kyle Downs, George Twitchell, Lavar Summers, Bill Shurtliff, Bill Shively, Mat Mecham and Barney Carpenter. In June 2026 Carpenter was still the man to call about fair-week custodial work.

The board has drawn on families like the Copes. Dale “Tike” Cope is a lifelong Monteview resident and second-generation farmer. He sat on the Mud Lake Fair and Rodeo board among at least nine others, and he has belonged to the West Jefferson Lions Club for 60 years. “My mom and dad were always very involved in everything that was going on,” he told the Jefferson Star in 2020. “It was handed down, I guess.” His daughter-in-law Kerrie said, “He’s added up over 240 years combined community service.”

In 2025 the grand marshals were Lynn and Kaylene Burtenshaw, who rode in the parade behind a team supplied by Shawn Burtenshaw. Each summer, before the gates open, the fairgrounds holds a family clean-up night. The 2023 notice asked neighbors to bring “shovels, rakes, weed trimmers, lawn mowers, and ambition.”