Northwest Washington Fair

The Northwest Washington Fair occupies the south side of Front Street in Lynden, half a mile east of the Guide Meridian, with parking on every side. Lynden lies in the northwestern part of Whatcom County, about 15 miles north of Bellingham and five miles south of the Canadian border. During the fair the gates open at 11 in the morning and close at 10 at night. The carnival rides of Funtastic Shows stand where a half-mile racetrack ran until 1991, a track that once hosted ostrich races. The grounds also hold a fountain, a clock tower, barn-like exhibit buildings at the north entry, and giant fir trees. Board member Ron Polinder, writing in 2018, recommended their shade to anyone tired of walking.

The 2026 fair ran August 13 to 22. The fair has been ten days long since 2021, when it returned from its 2020 cancellation during the COVID-19 pandemic with ten days of music, animals, exhibits, and food. The fair puts its own attendance at more than 200,000 guests a year.

Moo-Wiches, poffertjes, and the dairy barn

The Whatcom County Dairy Wives developed the Moo-Wich, which Lynden Tribune freelancer Elisa Claassen described in 2022 as “huge amounts of ice cream packed between cookies.” It is sold only at the fair, and she wrote that the lines for it have always been long. A second line forms for poffertjes, a Dutch treat made from a pancake-like batter and served in butter. Dutch settlers began arriving in Lynden in 1898, and the town is known for that heritage. Elephant ears and the fair hamburger round out the midway.

Claassen kept a fixed order of march. She went through the quilts and art, then into line for poffertjes, then to the Small Animal Experience to look at the small farm animals, and last to the horses. Competitive exhibits run from artwork and animals to LEGO and sewing. Polinder counted exhibitors who had been entering for 50 years and volunteer department superintendents who had held their posts for 30. His own grandchildren showed a calf, built a Lego exhibit, and worked with their 4-H club. Older visitors come for the six-horse hitches and the ever-larger tractors.

Polinder’s brother keeps an open tack room in the southeast corner of the dairy barn. From there Polinder watched parents pass through with children who wanted to touch the cows, learn their names, and see a calf born. He also saw Canadian visitors who praised the fair’s cleanliness and its “actual grass, unlike the PNE in Vancouver,” along with retired Canadian farmers “who just want to come and see some good cows again.”

The fair is run by the Northwest Washington Fair Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit of about 80 members who elect an unpaid board. Polinder wrote that it is a regional fair rather than a county fair. It receives no annual support from Whatcom County, takes a modest state grant for premiums, and pays taxes.

The grandstand and the Scholten’s Equipment Arena

Evening shows play in the grandstand, which the Tribune reported in 2014 seats just north of 3,000. The 2026 program was billed as the Bank of the Pacific Grandstand Entertainment Series:

• Stone Temple Pilots played a night of ‘90s hits on Saturday, August 15.
• Ja Rule and Fat Joe made their Lynden debut on Thursday, August 20.
• Brantley Gilbert closed on Friday, August 21. For his show the fair opened a new standing-room Party Pit in front of the stage, with a private beer garden.

The Lynden PRCA Rodeo ran on Monday and Tuesday, August 17 and 18, at 7 p.m. in the Scholten’s Equipment Arena. C5 Rodeo supplied the livestock, Jody Carper announced, and rodeo entertainer Matt Merritt returned for both nights. Children too small for the arena can ride in the Mutton Bustin’, whose sign-ups for 2026 filled before the fair.

The rodeo has run for more than 20 years. It first came inside fair week in 2014, on the Tuesday and Wednesday, instead of on the weekend after. Fair manager Jim Baron said that “by all accounts it went very well.” He added that it drew “some of the top roughstock contestants that compete in the world.”

That 2014 fair lasted six days, and the weather cut into the crowds. Monday reached the mid-90s, and rain fell through Wednesday and on Thursday evening. Total attendance came to 183,915. “Given a record-high temperature (on Monday) and record rainfall, all in the same week, that was a little unusual,” Baron said. “But we fared very well.” The Monday Demolition Derby drew its usual crowd, and Huey Lewis and the News outdrew the other concerts. A wildlife show, Predators of the Heart, played to standing room three times a day.

A produce fair on Front Street, 1909

Fairs were held in the area that became Bellingham as early as the mid-1870s. In 1894 and 1895 the Grand Central Hotel there housed county fair exhibits. In Lynden, William Coupe and his wife Nellie had settled in the 1870s on land that is now part of the fairgrounds.

On October 16, 1909, a two-day street fair took place along Front Street. It was called the Nooksack Valley Produce Fair. Its popularity led to the formation of a Whatcom County Fair Association in 1911. The association bought 20 acres bordering Front Street for $1,600, half of it raised through an estate loan and half through the sale of $25 shares. By August the association was still $600 in debt, the first of many shortfalls. The first Lynden fair, held October 17 to 20, 1911, drew 9,400 people. Later fall fairs offered baseball and high school football, kite-flying, baby contests, and horse, motorcycle, and automobile races.

Barnstorming aviators were invited to land on the racetrack infield in the 1920s. In 1920 Barney Barnett of Burlington flew his Curtiss Jenny biplane to Lynden, and 21-year-old Syl Weidkamp walked its wings without any safety equipment. The two then stuffed a pair of overalls with straw and threw it out of the plane, which allegedly horrified the spectators and police below.

Sources differ on the date of the name change. WhatcomTalk, drawing on Sarah Eden Wallace’s 2010 centennial book “100 Years at the Northwest Washington Fair,” says the event and its association became the Northwest Washington Fair in 1922. HistoryLink gives 1923. Through 1941 the fair was held in September or October. In 1924 the fairgrounds held a Ku Klux Klan demonstration.

Debt, a burned grandstand, and a war

A new grandstand went up in 1927. Attendance fell as debt rose, and in 1928 the stockholders voted to transfer the association’s assets to Whatcom County. In the winter of 1930–31 a storm blew the grandstand roof off. From 1931 to 1933 a smaller three-day agricultural fair took the place of the Northwest Washington Fair, and in 1932 the grandstand burned to the ground.

By March 1934 the fair was close to foreclosure. Its board met with business owners in Bellingham, and Lynden Tribune publisher Sol Lewis urged the town to rally behind the fair. Foreclosure was avoided, with help from residents such as Irwin LeCocq, Sr., of Peoples Bank. Rebuilding the grandstand required federal aid that a privately held fair could not receive. To get around this, the fairgrounds were quit-claimed to the City of Lynden, which opened the way to $32,000 from the Public Works Administration. The new grandstand stood in 1939.

No fair was held from 1942 to 1945. During those years the grounds were approved as a war disaster center for the Red Cross and civil defense. The fair resumed in August 1946 with the largest livestock show in its history and has kept an August date since.

By 1949 the fair owed $12,000. Seven board members each put in $1,700 of their own money, and all were repaid within a year. In 1952 the assets went to Whatcom County again. For the next four decades the county ran the fair on grounds the city owned and leased to it cheaply each year.

Loretta Lynn’s blue ribbons

In 1955 the fair grew from three days to four. In the mid-1960s there was talk of moving it to acreage near Smith and Northwest Roads, but it stayed on Front Street. Bellingham Herald photographer Jack Carver photographed the fair every August for three decades. One of his frames, dated August 16, 1967, shows Carol Streeter of the Squalicum 4-H and Dairy Club tending Nightdale King Lassie. The four-year-old Holstein won senior and grand champion for her owner, Bert Wright, a member of the Future Farmers of America.

By 1970 attendance topped 66,000 a year, and premiums came to more than $22,000. The later 1970s brought nearly $900,000 in improvements, tractor pulls, demolition derbies, and headline music. Loretta Lynn played in 1974 and returned in 1982 and 1998. She had spent part of her early life in Whatcom County. In those years she once won $25 in a fair talent contest for singing and earned 17 blue ribbons for canning.

Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, the Beach Boys, and the Newsboys have all played the same grandstand. For a time a county program let offenders trade labor for jail time, and prisoners painted barns, set up animal pens, and shoveled manure on the grounds.

WhatcomTalk gives 1992 as the all-time attendance record, at 243,181. The Lynden Tribune reported in 2014 that a record had been set in 2011, with 218,292.

In 1997 Trisha Yearwood was on stage when Garth Brooks, who had flown into Bellingham on his private jet, joined her unannounced. Claassen was leaving the grounds that night. “It was all we could talk about that week,” she wrote.

The same year the fair passed from county operation to a private nonprofit. It bought the 21-acre fairgrounds from the city for $250,000. Under the agreement the city does not tax fair admissions, and the land goes back to the city if the fair ever moves.