Multnomah County Fair

Peach jam in the Dance Pavilion

At the 2026 fair, Sandra Snyder stood in the Oaks Park Dance Pavilion holding a jar of peach jam that had taken a first-place ribbon and Best of Show. Snyder had once been the fair’s Foods Superintendent and held the post for many years. Around her the Creative Living Exhibition filled the long hall with nearly 1,500 entries: quilts, photographs, flowers, paintings, crafts, baked goods and pies. The exhibitors ranged from young children to adults in their nineties. According to The Bee, the count was the highest since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition had been absent the year before while the pavilion was remodeled, and returning visitors could see the renovation work from the north end of the room. The fair’s own exhibit categories are Arts & Crafts, Floral, Photography, Needle Crafts, and Foods, among others.

The 2026 edition ran May 23 through 25, from noon to 7 p.m. each day, over Memorial Day weekend. The Bee counted it as the 120th fair. Admission was free and Oaks Park charged $4 to park. Emily MacKay, marketing and events director for the Oaks Park Association, estimated that about 12,200 people came through the park over the three days. Saturday and Sunday were dry. “Saturday and Sunday offered perfect weather this year and Oaks Park was packed with people,” said Larry Smith, president of Friends of Multnomah County Fair. On Memorial Day, rain arrived in mid-afternoon. Some visitors went home, and others stayed under cover to watch Ballet Folklorico groups in the Outdoor Pavilion.

Smith named Sunday’s Día de la Familia as a high point of the 2026 fair, with Aztec dancers, mariachi music, and Portland Lucha Libre bouts. Wrestlers from Portland Wrestling and Lucha Libre Portland fought before crowds three and four deep. The Yeates Academy of Irish Dance performed traditional steps, and Ballet Folklorico Mexico en la Piel Academia danced in the Outdoor Pavilion. Other events included a classic car show, a dog costume parade, character visits, and a robotics exhibition by local high school FIRST teams. Dachshunds ran in the Dashing Dachshund Races. One dog owner told KPTV that she had read about the fair on Facebook that morning and thought “maybe she will win a prize.” The small animal area still holds goats, rabbits, and other small creatures for children to pet.

Cristina Gonzales Perry, the event’s emcee, helps organize the fair with her family. “When my family first started getting involved, we would talk to the community,” she said, “a lot of people didn’t know that Multnomah County had its own fair.”

The Oaks Park midway

The fair occupies one section of Oaks Amusement Park, which keeps running around it during the three days. The midway has 24 rides, from the Adrenaline Peak and AtmosFEAR to the Carousel and the Tilt-A-Whirl. Rides cost extra, and every rider needs a bracelet, including a parent riding along with a child. Jack and Debby Youngkin brought their granddaughter in 2026. “We rode the train,” they told KPTV, and “the granddaughter is just having a great time.” Along the midway are games of skill and chance, including Balloon Bust, Basketball Toss, and Roller Bowler, along with a redemption arcade. Each play costs one to five dollars.

Beyond the rides, Chipper’s Woods is an 18-hole miniature golf course in the oak grove that gave the park its name. It looks out over the Willamette River toward Portland’s West Hills. The park’s roller rink, by the fair’s own account, is the oldest in the country and has the largest skating floor west of the Mississippi.

On Vendors Row, more than 25 small businesses sold crafts, food, and services in 2026. The food stands were Chimnik European Bakery, Lupita’s Taqueria, Juicy JV’s Wings, Asona Cuisine, Dairy Hill Ice Cream, and Sister’s Frye Bread. Sean Anderson brought his children on the Saturday after seeing the rides on TikTok. “[The kids] don’t have to be at school on Monday,” he said, “so we can get plenty tired tonight.”

Stumps on Johnson Creek

The fair’s start is told three ways. The fair’s own history says members of Gresham Grange and Multnomah’s Grange first discussed a fair in the mid-1890s. It says that on July 13, 1906, at a regular meeting at Gresham Grange, a motion passed that every Grange in Multnomah County would cooperate in presenting a County Fair. The fair was to be held on a tract in Gresham that had been intended for a park. It was first called the Grange Fair, and in its early years the Gresham Grange served as the fair office. The Gresham Historical Society dates the first fair to 1907, as an agricultural fair organized by the Gresham Grange. A 1959 City Club of Portland report also gives 1907 but credits someone else. In that account, an independent group of stockholders, seeing how well the yearly fall grange fairs did, formed a corporation to sponsor the 1907 fair and carnival and invited all residents and granges to take part.

According to the historical society, the first ground lay on the bank of Johnson Creek behind the Grange Hall. Stumps and uneven ground made it a poor fairground. In 1908 the fair moved to a plot directly west of Gresham’s downtown business district. A photograph from that year shows a building hung with banners, a sign reading “GRANGE | HEADQUARTERS,” three tents, two wagons with horses, and tree-covered Wallula Heights behind. Someone wrote across the corner: “first fair-1908 | at the present | location.”

A grandstand in Gresham

The fair grew on that downtown ground for six decades. The Oregon Encyclopedia lists horse races, exhibition halls, live performances, food stands, and rides there, with thousands of visitors each year. A historical society photograph from those years shows musicians on a stage before a crowd, with tractors and cars parked beside a “Gresham Equipment Co.” sign.

Its management changed hands more than once. The City Club report says Multnomah County paid some premiums and other expenses from 1912. In 1933 the State Legislature set aside pari-mutuel racing money to promote and operate county fairs. By the club’s account, the stockholders turned everything over to the county in the mid-1930s, and the Multnomah County Fair Association, a private nonprofit, ran it for the county until 1949. That year the county’s Tax Supervising and Conservation Commission reported dissatisfaction with the association’s management and its handling of tax funds. The commissioners refused to renew the five-year fairgrounds lease and took over direct operation. In 1950 they made the fair a separate county department under a hired business manager. Before that, the last known building work on the grounds dated from the WPA days of the mid-1930s.

The 1959 report includes a plan of the Gresham grounds: a grandstand and bleachers, a race-horse barn and paddock, floral and art halls, sewing and photography, swine and poultry barns, a carnival lot, and an armed services café. At the time the fair usually ran ten days in early August, with nine days of commercial horse racing. Its permanent staff was a manager and two groundskeepers. According to the county handbook, attendance grew from 90,000 in 1950 to more than 170,000 in 1955. The report describes a non-racing Sunday at the 1958 fair, when a 4-H horse exhibition held the track in the morning. It drew so much interest that it was difficult to close in time for the Shetland Pony Club show that afternoon.

Gresham wanted the fair gone. On November 9, 1953, the Gresham Chamber of Commerce urged the county commissioners to find a new site. In November 1956 a poll of chamber members favored moving the fair, and the chamber renewed its request in writing.

From the Expo Center to the oak grove

The fair’s own history says county leaders sold the Gresham fairgrounds in 1966 and bought a site in North Portland. That site became the Expo Center. Because the work there took several years, the fair stayed in Gresham through 1968, after 62 years on its original ground. The Gresham Historical Society says the fair stayed through 1969. The Oregon Encyclopedia gives 1970 as the year it moved to the Expo Center.

The county’s support ended in the 1990s, and the year is given differently by different sources. The fair’s history says the fair ran at the Expo Center until 1996, around the time the Multnomah County Commission removed county funding. In 2011, Rick Paul, then president of the Friends, said the county had not supported the fair since 1993. Community members formed Friends of the Multnomah County Fair, Inc. and took over the fair. The organization names Rick Paul, Mary Trupp, Frank Knapp, Lillian Adams, and Rick Sanders as the people without whom it would not have survived. It credits Ron Burback of Funtastic Inc. as a key negotiator in bringing the fair to Oaks Park in 1997. Apart from two years in the early 2000s at Portland Meadows, the fair has been held at the park ever since.

East Portland News covered the 105th fair, which opened on May 28, 2011. A boy named Apollo Dolkas played in the Corn Bin. Professor Bamboozle performed his “Balloonery Loonery.” An assistant to the Floral Superintendent pinned ribbons on the judged entries. Pig races and pedal-powered tractor pulls were new that year, and the needlecraft division had 40 exhibits, fourteen more than the year before. The fair then ran on an annual budget of $6,800, with eight volunteers working year-round. Smith told The Bee in 2026 that a mid-1990s county budget showed more than $400,000 for what was then a five-day fair. The Friends now stage it for “just over $75,000,” he said, “and not a penny of that comes from taxpayer revenue.”

In 2011, Paul looked over the Dance Pavilion full of craft exhibits and explained what kept the volunteers going: “it’s a ‘celebration of our people’ and their talents.”