Nevada County Fair

Treat Street is the food row of the Nevada County Fair, and most of its booths are worked by neighbors. Job’s Daughters International, Bethel 102, fries corn dogs, some of them dipped in nacho cheese. Nevada City Little League sells corn on the cob. The Nevada City United Methodist Church serves bratwurst and sauerkraut, the Rough & Ready Fire crew baked potatoes with toppings, and the Watt Park Firefighters Association ice cream cones, shakes and sundaes. Mount Saint Mary’s Academy has funnel cake and chocolate-covered cheesecake. The Northern Mines Girl Scouts pour lemon and peach slushes and one called the Orange Juliette. The Nevada County Jewish Community Center runs a Corner Deli with bagels and lox, kosher hot dogs and Reubens. Together the booths raise more than $1 million a year for local groups and community programs. “We always like to joke that the calories don’t count but the money does,” Andrew Trygg of the Fairgrounds told YubaNet in 2024.

The street changes hands slowly. For over 60 years the Nevada City Lions Club ran the taco booth. By 2024 its numbers had declined and it could not return, so Forest Lake Christian School took the booth through a competitive process, kept the Lions Club’s winning recipe, and added boba. Lisa Swarthout, the District 3 supervisor, first came to the fair at 14, the year her family moved to the county, and shucked corn for the Lions’ corn booth. For the 2026 fair she planned to serve baked potatoes with the Rough and Ready volunteer firefighters and hot dogs with her husband at the Grass Valley Volunteer Fire Department, and to buy bagels and lox from the Jewish Community Center, which she says she never misses.

The fair under the pines

The fairgrounds cover almost 90 acres on McCourtney Road. Hundreds of tall pines shade the grounds, and the Fairgrounds call them “California’s Most Beautiful Fairgrounds.” Grass Valley is about an hour’s drive from Sacramento, near highways 80, 49 and 20. There are five exhibit buildings with 60,000 square feet of floor and barns for more than 1,000 animals. Children 12 and under may fish in Lions Lake, and a year-round RV park overlooks it, though it takes no tents or car campers. The 2026 fair ran August 12 through 16. The county expected more than 90,000 visitors, and a Fairgrounds release put the number at nearly 100,000. The fair opens on Wednesday morning with Opening Ceremonies. Its carnival is supplied by Butler Amusements, which has worked with the fair for more than 40 years, and it runs until 11 at night.

Most of the entertainment is free. Acts play the Pine Tree Stage, the Michelob Ultra Stage and Foundation Station. At the Special Events Tent in 2026, Izzi Tooinsky, billed as the King of Hotdogastan, juggled and told stories. In the Cold Toes Challenge, contestants put their feet in ice water and tried to pick marbles off the bottom of a bucket with their toes. In the Frozen T-Shirt Challenge, they thawed shirts that had been soaked, scrunched and frozen until they could get their heads and arms into them. Squash-mobile racing began at 12:30 on Friday, and anyone could bring a squash. Watermelon-eating was done without hands. The Grow That Fro & Beard Contest had four classes, among them Mullett Madness and Ponytail Express. Karaoke ran nightly. At the Dance Pad there is a Kids Bubble Dance Party at 1 p.m. each day. In 2026 the evening DJ nights included Thursday’s County Tunes & Line Dancing and Saturday’s Electro Glow Nite, opened by the Sol Risers Fire Troupe with, as the schedule put it, “sorry, no fire.” In the grandstand arena the Rough Truck Challenge headlined. Monster Trucks have long been a fixture there. Lauren Booth, a county food-safety inspector who spends fair week checking the 49 food vendors, says she goes to the pig races every year.

The calendar moves in 2027. The California State Fair is shifting to mid-September, and that changes carnival routes. To keep Butler Amusements, the Nevada County Fair will run eight days over two weekends, July 23–25 and July 28–August 1, and will close July 26 and 27. “Attendance has been growing each year, which often leads to long lines on Friday and Saturday nights,” Trygg said.

Steers, scales and the Sunday auction

Behind Treat Street, next to the livestock, the Fairgrounds opened a display area in 2024 called Family Farm. Blacksmiths work there, alongside tables for 4-H, the Nevada County Beekeepers, The Cattlewomen and the White Barn Project, which runs a uniform and clothing exchange for 4-H exhibitors. The barns hold cattle and dairy cows, horses, sheep, goats, rabbits, chickens, pigs and turkeys raised by local youth. “Youth are coming here and this might be the very first time they get to see a 300 pound steer or a cute little rabbit,” Trygg said that year.

The week before the 2026 fair opened, the county Department of Agriculture, Weights and Measures drove a 48,000-pound truck onto the grounds. It carried twenty 1,000-pound blocks, used to test the cattle scale, which weighs animals up to 3,000 pounds. “We want to make sure the buyers and the sellers are getting what they pay for,” said Tony Romero, in his 15th year with the department.

Those weights decide the money. The Ag Mechanics Auction sells projects built by students, and in 2026 it was held Friday evening. The Junior Livestock Auction follows at 9 a.m. Sunday in the Whitney Pavilion. In 2025 the two raised nearly $1.3 million for young exhibitors, and $215,029 of that came as “bump up” bids, cash given on top of the sale price. “Friday night and Sunday are the times to see the kids shine,” said Sue Hoek, the District 4 supervisor, who grew up in 4-H and FFA. Swarthout buys a pig at the Sunday auction every year.

Wagon teams in winter, draft horses in September

The fairgrounds stay busy after August. The 2026 Country Christmas Faire is set for November 27–29. More than 100 artisans fill the exhibit buildings, and the grounds have a gingerbread house, wagon rides and a community bonfire. Santa sits in the Chapel.

Jack Parnell, who grew up around horses near Auburn, drove a wagon team at the Christmas Faire every year. He was California’s secretary of agriculture in 1987, when the state Department of Food and Agriculture set aside $30,000 a year for three years for the Nevada County fair to put on an event. While driving his team at the Christmas Faire, Parnell suggested a draft horse show to the fair’s CEO, Ed Scofield. “He told me he’d always wanted to do a draft horse show, and it kind of clicked,” Scofield recalled. Parnell said the trees had decided him: “There is a God-given magic to those huge trees.”

Scofield said the first Classic, in 1987, barely made money even with the state subsidy. In 1988 the fairgrounds became a staging area for firefighters fighting the 49er fire, and draft horse teams from Colorado and Utah were stopped at the state line and told about the trouble in Nevada County. “I don’t believe in canceling events,” Scofield said, but he called that one off. In 1989 a rainstorm stopped the show after a day and a half. “Two out of the first three years, we lost the event,” he said, “and my board looked at it, and asked if we really wanted to do it.” By 2011, 88 competitors drove teams for about $34,000 in prize money, against a few dozen teams and about $9,250 in 1987. Scofield called it “the premier draft horse show in the western United States.” The show was cancelled a third time in 2020, because of COVID-19 limits on mass gatherings. In a normal year it draws more than 15,000 people.

The 2026 Classic ran September 17–20, with six arena shows over four days. Admission to the grounds was free for the Harvest Fair around it, where visitors could walk into the barns and meet the horses.

Gold, eggplant and a 25-cent gate

The Fairgrounds are also the 17th District Agricultural Association, a state agency. It was formed in 1884 under an 1859 law that authorized agricultural districts, but it receives no funding from the State of California. The first fair of the modern era was announced by The Morning Union for October 16, 17 and 18, 1938, at the Veterans Memorial Building on South Auburn Street and the James S. Hennessy school playground. It had a horse show and judging of beef cattle, dairy cattle and poultry, but its main feature was minerals. Gold mining was then the county’s largest industry, and the directors offered $1,500 in prize money across 10 gold divisions. “It is the plan to work the mineral show into the best exhibit of gold in any fair or display in California,” the paper reported. The California Cornish Gold Mining Singers performed, along with “a high class carnival company.”

No fairs were held from 1942 through 1946 because of World War II. In 1947 the fair moved to McCourtney Road, and the first buildings went up in 1951.

In the 1960s the general manager was Malcolm E. Hammill, called “Mr. Nevada County Fair.” The agricultural sweepstakes were dominated by Val and Lilly Belle Biama, who grew their produce on a Banner Mountain farm they called the “Republic of North California,” and by the orchardist Ernst Bierwagen of Chicago Park. A 2004 Union column recorded talk overheard on the grounds: “I thought Ernie’s lemon cukes were superior to Val’s.” The answer: “Yes, but Lilly’s eggplant beats all.” In 1960 the Biamas set a sweepstakes record of 476 points, beating 1959’s 436. Bierwagen won horticulture. In 1961 the board, chaired by Henry Magonigal, raised adult admission from 10 cents to 25 cents. According to the column, “a rumor rumbled through the fairgrounds that a pot of boiling roofing tar was seen out by the poultry cages, but it was never proven.” The same decade’s “comic entries” were won again and again by Lizzie Glotzmier, described as a resident of Spain, whose ribbons were collected by her traveling secretary, Dr. Leo F. Conti.

The war years were the only gap in the fair’s history until 2020, when it was cancelled again. In 2021 it came back. Patrick Eidman, who had shown livestock on these grounds as a boy and was then CEO, said: “Having the year off without the fair was really tough.”

A face under the tail

A bronze draft horse called the Gentle Giant stands at the entrance. Eidman said it “speaks to the special significance the Classic has to the Fairgrounds.” The nonprofit Historical Landmarks Commission spent a decade raising money for it. Donors paid $50 a line to put names on the plaques along the base, and some companies bought a whole plaque for $10,000. Robert Hildebrand donated the labor to pour the base in 1991. The Union reported that the sculpture went on in 1996, once the $250,000 for it had been raised. The Fairgrounds’ own timeline gives 1997.

The base holds a public time capsule, a space two by eight feet. Everyone involved later agreed it was never filled. The sculptor, Todd Andrews of Grass Valley, and Hildebrand covered the opening with rocks. “It’s big enough for someone to fit in there,” Hildebrand said. In 2015, as he prepared to move to Arizona, Hildebrand revealed that he had built a second compartment of his own and covered it with concrete. Inside are laminated Union articles about the project, a letter to his nephew, photographs and a baseball cap. He said he would not disclose its location unless the large capsule was filled.

Andrews had decorated the horse with stone medallion faces, one of them under the tail, “just a face blowing a kiss,” he said. When Boy Scouts came to polish the bronze, Andrews told them about it. They began teasing one another, and one boy, of Maidu descent, told his parents. Sandy Woods, then deputy manager, got a call from the undersheriff warning of a protest by Native Americans at the unveiling. “I actually think it looked more Italian,” Woods said later. Andrews was covering the face with wax when an official of the Bureau of Indian Affairs inspected it and told him, “Don’t worry about it — it’s obviously not Native American.” The Union quoted Andrews the next day: “I have rectified the situation.” By 2015, he said, someone had scraped away the wax, and “it has reared its ugly head again.”