Othello Fair

The animals arrive first. Dave Sperl, a longtime member of the fair board, told the Basin Business Journal in 2020 that he works the back gate on the Tuesday night before the Othello Fair opens: “I see every little kid come in with their sheep in the back of a pickup, their eyes this big and a smile on their face.” By nine the next morning the market classes are under way in the barns: lamb, swine, sheep, rabbit, goat, poultry and beef. The 2026 fair ran September 16 through 19 on the grounds off Reynolds Road under the theme “Stars, Stripes & Summer Nights… Celebrating America’s 250th.”

Becky Flint of the fair committee estimated about 7,000 entries in 2026, across the livestock, arts and crafts, horticulture, photography and fine arts departments. “That’s the most ever,” she told the Columbia Basin Herald. The rabbit barn had been doubled and a new beef office built, paid for through the donation drive held each year during the livestock sale. The campground on the south end of the property had filled its power spots before the fair, though its dry camping has no limit. Flint counted the overflow and then corrected herself: “I have 40 more campers than usual. No, I bet I have 50 campers more than usual.”

Barns, arenas and the Blue Stage

Through the week the horse arena holds 4-H, FFA, Grange and open classes in showmanship, trail, rail and games. The livestock barns run judging every day. Pre-4-H exhibitors show beef on Wednesday afternoon in a bucket calf contest, and on Thursday rabbits come out costumed for the Funny Bunny Dress Up Contest. Friday evening brings a draft horse pull at five and the Sequins & Spurs drill team at half past six. Cowboy mounted shooters ride on Saturday morning. At ten that morning the livestock sale opens in the sale arena, “SHARP,” as the schedule puts it, and the animals sell in fixed order: beef, poultry, sheep, rabbits, swine, goats, dairy.

Between the barns the entertainers keep to a timetable. Danny Vernon performs as Elvis on the CBHA Stage, Matt Henry alternates juggling with bubbles, and The Country Shack plays both the stage and the paths. The Birdman holds the Blue Stage. Tyler Sterling twists balloons, Ky Dobbs walks the grounds with a Wagon of Whimsy and something billed as the MAC Flexbot, and acts called Duck Rogers and Fairly Bigfoot roam on the half hour. The Kid Zone south of the exhibit building opens at ten each morning and closes at five. The carnival opens at four on Wednesday and at three on Thursday and Friday, by the Herald’s account, and the printed schedule opens it at eleven on Saturday. On the last night it runs until midnight. A cornhole tournament takes the north lawn at Saturday noon.

Spoon tacos and green beans

The fair’s website lists cheeseburgers, corn dogs, pie and cotton candy, but the food court’s traditions belong to the town’s congregations and clubs. The Othello Rotary booth serves chicken dinners, Sacred Heart Catholic Church makes spoon tacos, and the Othello ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints fries elephant ears. “There’s always a line,” Flint said. “I always wait until 10 at night, right before I go to bed, and there’s still a long line.”

In the Commercial Building in 2026 the Othello Community Museum set out an unlabeled object and a jar for guesses. Suzie Dillman, Allyn Pruneda and Morgan Marchand named it correctly as a Railroad Hoop Message Delivery Stick. Visitors to the booth also filled out cards about what they loved in Othello and dropped them in a vintage mailbox for the museum’s collection. The museum’s own posts that week still called the event the Adams County Fair.

Under that name, in 2008, the exhibit building had scarecrows along its walls for the theme “Scarin’ up some fun.” New mirrors stood behind the shelves of preserved food. Eight entrants competed that year for the $25 Homemaker’s Award, which requires blue ribbons in four of six categories: needlework, clothing, food preservation, flowers, baked goods and horticulture. One of the judges, Joann Rowley, had moved to Othello four years earlier and volunteered because she thought it would be fun. Her whole family canned. That year her husband Mark took a Ball Corporation award for cherries. Their daughter Morgan, nineteen months old, took another for a jar of green beans, and her brother Dustin, two, earned a ribbon for his. “I love canning,” Rowley said. “I love food preservation.”

Demolition derby, rodeo and parade

The rodeo arena sits directly behind the fairgrounds on Bulldogger Lane, and the noise of the week moves there in the evenings. The Othello Demolition Derby fills it on Wednesday night: the drivers meet at 5:30, then come trophy dashes, heat races, a powder puff race and the annual Bill Bagwell Memorial before the finale.

On Friday morning, from ten to eleven, the free Rascal Rodeo invites people of all ages with physical or developmental challenges to meet horses and cattle up close and to take part in games and races. The Adams County Sheriff’s Posse handles the horses. The first performance of the Othello PRCA Rodeo begins at nine that night, with bronc and bull riding and barrel racing, and the rodeo continues Saturday. In a Herald file photo from 2025, Wacey Schalla fights to stay on for eight seconds.

Saturday at ten the parade rolls and walks down Main Street from its assembly point on 13th Street behind Othello Community Hospital. A grand marshal leads it. The fair chooses that person for service to the Othello community, and the grand marshal also helps pick the parade’s award winners.

Picnic baskets under tarps

Sandy Dodge, whose family gave the land, said in 2020 that there had been fairs of some kind on the South Reynolds Road site, near West Bench Road, for at least 60 years. “It’s kind of complicated,” she said, at a table in the Othello Senior Center. “My grandmother (Bess Hampton) and Mrs. Harvey Bailey started a little fair, it was just a dinky little thing where people could get out and have picnic baskets and bring their wares and whatnot.” The fair’s own history credits A. O. and Bess Hampton together with Harvey Bailey, and says the fair moved among several locations in its early years.

Dodge’s grandfather, A. O. Hampton, decided the fair needed a better place. After Bess died in 1958, he donated the present site to one of Othello’s granges. There were once several, and Dodge has not been able to learn which one received it. “The grange wanted a place to meet instead of where they were meeting, so that’s how they got involved,” she said. The fair’s history adds that the gift came on the condition that the land be used as a permanent fairgrounds.

The West County Fair began there with its big buildings unroofed and covered in tarps and smaller tents scattered around them. Over the years the rodeo grounds moved, and cloth gave way to wood and wood to concrete. Dodge credited much of that to her parents, Bud and Naomi Hampton. “When my grandmother passed, Dad got everyone involved in making our fairgrounds better,” she said. “As a family, we would have a workday and go out there. … The ladies would set up a barbecue and have lunch for everybody.”

Her favorite memories are of the big parade that opened the fair, the state rodeo queen pageants the grounds once hosted, and the jail. During fair week a pickup or trailer carried a little “jail” up and down Main Street. When the riders spotted someone they knew who was not at the fair, they “arrested” that person, who stayed locked up until a friend or relative paid the bail by buying a fair ticket.

One county, one fair

In August 1966 a Mr. Hintze called together people from Ritzville, Washtucna, Lind and Othello to form an official Adams County Fair Board. That board oversaw two fairs, each with its own committee: the East Adams County Fair in Ritzville and the West in Othello. State agriculture money for premiums went two-thirds east and one-third west. The fair’s history says the West board built the exhibit building and restrooms, then livestock pens, horse stalls and an office. The Moose, Eagles, J.C.’s, Rotary, Lions, the LDS church and 4-H joined in, along with businesses that gave time and material. The fair grew quickly, and in time the money was split evenly.

When the Grange disbanded, its members met with the West District board. After meetings beginning in October 1979, the Hampton land officially became the West District Adams County Fair in January 1980. That December, after fourteen years of divided government, the county commissioners named the West fair the official Adams County Fair. Dodge remembered the decision as Olympia’s: “The state said, ‘We can’t keep funding two little fairs.’ One county, one fair for that county. Since the population and the growth was in Othello, we would be the fair.” She dated the formal change only to the late 1970s or early 1980s. The East fair became the Wheat Land Communities’ Fair, which held its 2026 edition September 3 through 6 in Ritzville.

The fair took its present name in 2018. The research record dates the change to May 30 of that year and ties it to a finding by the Washington State Auditor’s Office that the agreement between Adams County and the fair association did not accord with state law. Dodge described a dispute with the county that ended with the fair declaring its independence and winning state recognition as the Othello Fair. In compiling its history, the fair found two names recurring in the minutes of both the old county board and the West fair, and still present at the fair today. Hugh Rettowski works the sheep department. Courtney Nelson can be found in quilting.

In 2020 the fair was canceled for the COVID-19 pandemic. It was the first year anyone could remember without a fair of some kind on the grounds. “We have waited and waited, hoping, hoping, hoping that we could maybe still have a fair, but about the middle of July, we knew it wasn’t going to happen,” Sperl said. That summer Dodge said of the fair: “It’s kind of like I inherited it, it’s part of our family, it’s part of our family history. Family’s still involved, we’re still involved, and probably we’ll still be out there supporting it until we’re under the sod.”