Tulelake-Butte Valley Fair

At ten on the Sunday morning of the fair, children chase small pigs around the grandstand at the Tulelake-Butte Valley Fairgrounds, 800 Main Street, Tulelake. A child who catches one may take the piglet home with a parent’s permission. The 2024 program listed the event as a greased pig contest. Sunday is Family Day, and the gate is free.

Four days in September

The 2026 fair, the 75th, ran from Thursday, September 10, through Sunday, September 13, under the theme “Celebrating 75 Years.” Nancy Wessel, chief executive of the fairgrounds, told the Klamath Falls Herald and News: “We’re bringing back old-time competitions because it’s the 75th year.” On the Community Stage that meant contests in pie eating, seed spitting, water balloons and horseradish grinding, several rounds of each across the four days. At the grandstand the barnyard rodeo ran three-legged and egg-on-a-spoon races. On Saturday night a CCPRA rodeo returned after a nine-year hiatus. “We just thought, well, we haven’t done it in a while, and it is the 75th year,” Wessel said.

The 2026 program opened at 9 a.m. Thursday with a gymkhana horse show in the arena by the grandstand. From then on the livestock rings ran from early morning into the evening, showing market lambs, beef and dairy cattle, swine, goats, turkeys, poultry and rabbits. A beef ultrasound was held at Jock’s Sale Pavilion, and the Kathy Ackley Memorial Pee Wee Showmanship took place in the beef ring. Saturday began with Pioneer Day at The Honker at 10 a.m., and the parade followed at noon. At 1 p.m. Caballos Bailadores, the Mexican Dancing Horses, performed at the grandstand while the Buffalo Chicks Cloggers danced on the Community Stage. The Main Stage carried an Alabama tribute band called Tennessee River, the Rag Tag All Star Party Band playing rock, country and oldies, and Los Sismos De Michoacan on three nights. On Sunday at 11 a.m. a church service was held on the same stage.

The parade starts on Saturday at the corner of Main and Modoc streets and moves down Main Street to the fairgrounds. Entries are free and come in categories that include antique machinery, horse-drawn rigs, pets and livestock, and school spirit floats. The fair counts hundreds of spectators from Modoc, Klamath and Siskiyou counties. In 2026 the Crater Lake Trolley ran free shuttles on Saturday and Sunday. They left from the Klamath Falls Senior Center in Oregon and stopped at the Polar Bear restaurant in Merrill.

The carnival is Paul Maurer Shows, a California traveling company. Its tallest rides are the 100-foot Super-Shot, the 70-foot Giant Wheel with its light show, and the 55-foot Rock Star. The rides and games are hung with three-toned canvases, and wagons sell hand-dipped corndogs, cotton candy and popcorn. The fair also has a beer garden, chainsaw carvings, juggling and balloon animals. A Herald and News photograph from 2015 shows boys on the midway at Bank a Ball, a Wiffle ball game. The 2024 fair brought back the Tulelake and Butte Valley Destruction Derby and had country singer Travis Denning on the grandstand. That year there were pony rides by the horse barns, and mariachi and magic on Sunday. A writer in 2024 noted “plenty of shade and grass.” Longtime Tulelake resident Lisa Kaskura told the paper, “It’s a solid event with plenty to do.” A four-year-old named Bear, at Tulelake for the first time, said, “I’m most excited to see the animals.”

The auction at Jock’s Sale Pavilion

The animals end at Jock’s Sale Pavilion on Sunday afternoon, where the Tulelake Rotary Club runs the youth livestock auction at 2 p.m. Bidders raise a paddle or a hand. When a bid wins, a runner brings the bill of sale to the buyer to sign. According to the Rotary, 92 percent of the first purchase price of each market animal goes to the young seller. The club keeps an 8 percent commission, which pays for the auction. Half of the net from that commission goes back to the fair, and the rest goes to Rotary’s community and youth work. At the end of the sale the club auctions animals of its own to fund college scholarships for graduating seniors from Tulelake, Butte Valley and Lost River high schools.

Many of the young people in the barns also help run the fair. The Junior Fair Board takes youth from the 8th grade up to 19 years of age and puts them to work in the livestock departments before and during the fair. The fair court has two members, Miss Tulelake and Miss Butte Valley. A panel of judges chooses them, and the 2024 court was crowned on March 2 at the Fair Friends fundraiser. The court represents the fair at events through the year. The 2025 fair marked 50 years of the court under the parade theme “A Royal AfFair.”

The 2026 Miss Butte Valley, Paola Ceniceros, was a senior at Butte Valley High School and secretary of the Junior Fair Board. Miss Tulelake, Quetzalli Chavez-Garcia, was a senior at Tulelake High School and showed a pig at the fair. Gayle Ratliff, a potato farmer’s wife who came to the fair through her daughter’s 4-H projects, served 17 years on the fair board. When she died in 2022, her family asked that memorial gifts go to the fair’s youth livestock department.

A barrack at the fairgrounds museum

The fair office stands in a 1959 building first used as the maintenance shop, and it also houses the Local History Museum and Visitors Center. The museum is generally open weekdays from 9 to 4. The Tulelake Butte Valley Fair Friends assembled its exhibits. They cover each of the area’s small towns, the Modoc War, the Japanese internment camp, the two world wars and the homesteaders. Another section explains how the Lava Beds became a monument. A memorial Veteran Wall honors local service members.

The Densho Encyclopedia describes the part of the museum given to the Tule Lake detention center. Half of an original Tule Lake barrack and a guard tower were moved to the grounds and restored. A 3-D mural lets visitors look down on the camp to grasp, in Densho’s words, “its size, desolation, and dull appearance.” The audio guide includes accounts from Jimi and Eiko Yamaichi, who were held there. Murals of the Klamath landscape, Modoc Indian artifacts and regional photographs fill the remaining rooms. The National Park Service app offers self-guided tours of the museum. The Park Service’s own visitor center for Tule Lake National Monument is 8 miles south on Highway 139.

The museum began with schoolchildren. By 1957 the fair held a recurring “show and tell” exhibit of artifacts brought in mostly by local elementary students. The Fair Board set up a “museum” for them in the livestock sale barn, where it stayed for decades. A strategic plan in 1999 merged the museum with the fair offices so the two could share staff. In 2001 the museum received money from the fair budget and a $26,000 California Civil Liberties Public Education Program Grant. The grant came on the understanding that the museum would preserve and expand its exhibits on the camp.

Seven dollars and a hog

The fair grew out of the Rotary Junior Livestock Show, which the Tulelake Rotary Club organized in 1949, 1950 and 1951 on the grounds of the present elementary school. Before those shows, young exhibitors had to take their livestock to the Siskiyou Golden Fair in Yreka. Chet Main, Dan Crawford, Ivan Rose, Charlie Weiss and Otto Schultz asked Sacramento for a fair of their own. The fair’s history says they were told there was “no possibility.” The state had decided that no more fairs were to be established “under any circumstances.”

Main’s committee went to work on Senator Collier and Assemblyman Lester Davis. Over the objections of the Western Fairs Association, the legislature passed a bill authorizing the 10-A District Agricultural Association. The name comes from the part of the 10th District’s territory it took, the district of the Siskiyou Golden Fair. The Yreka fair’s own history records that it had been the only fair of the 10th District until 1952. That year a second fair was established in Siskiyou County, and the Yreka fair took a new name, the Siskiyou County Fair and Paul Bunyan Festival.

Governor Earl Warren appointed eight men to the first board: Chet Main, Bill Hagelstein, Webb Staunton, Pete Bergman, Arnold Criss, Vern Hemstreet, Toad Boyd and Paul Christy. Main was elected president. The board had no money at its first meeting in February 1952, so the members took up a collection. When the meeting ended they had a budget of $7. They also had no grounds, so the first fair was held on the old high school lawn. The carnival was set up in the street in front of the Legion Hall, beside the old bowling alley. Hemstreet contributed a hog, which was auctioned off over and over to raise premium money for the livestock awards. The Densho Encyclopedia describes this first fair as a local carnival.

A 35-acre alfalfa field

Without grounds the board could get money for little beyond administration, so it went after Don Potter’s alfalfa field. The field belonged to the Bureau of Reclamation. Through the efforts of Congressman Clair Engel and others, the board got title to the land by an act of Congress. The fair’s history then asks: “What do you do when you have a 35-acre alfalfa field and somebody tells you to build a fair on it?”

The board answered with a plan for twenty years ahead. It wanted a place where people from Butte Valley, Tulelake and “over the line in Oregon” could meet and compete. It wanted “winding curbless streets and green lawns with benches,” with shade trees. Parents should be able to lose their children “without fear,” and people in wheelchairs should be able to enter every building. Schools and community groups should be able to use the grounds all year.

Sam Kellet managed the 1952 fair. In May 1953 the board hired William C. Whitaker, who had worked at fairs in Utah, and told him to draw a master plan. The State Department of Architecture approved the plan late that year, and construction began in the spring of 1954. The first fair on the new grounds was held over Labor Day weekend in 1954. It had two cattle barns, one restroom, and an auction building that also served for indoor exhibits and is now the auction barn. Construction continued as money came in:

• 1955: sewer, water, electricity, the office building and the main exhibit building
• 1956: the commercial building
• 1957: the home economics building and the horse barns
• 1959: the grandstands
• 1963: a carousel
• 1968: the arts and crafts building
• 1970: a concession building

Whitaker resigned in 1967 “to take another position.” A William Whitaker appears on the Siskiyou Golden Fair’s list of managers in Yreka from January 1970 to March 1974. Mark Reed held the Tulelake job for two years. He was followed by Ralph Morrill, who had been senior maintenance supervisor for 14 years. Leona Carter, secretary “from the very beginning,” retired in December 1982. Cindy Wright had been a seasonal worker since 1970. She was hired as business assistant in 1983 and replaced Morrill when he retired in May 1987. Dave Dillabo was CEO from 2006 to 2015, and the fair’s history records Nancy Sites named CEO in May 2016.

That history states that no tax money went into building or running the fair. All its funds came from 2 percent of a tax on pari-mutuel betting at California horse tracks. The Yreka fair’s history adds a later chapter for California fairs generally. In 2010 their funding was moved into the state general fund, and in 2011 it was eliminated.

The fair keeps a list of parade themes. It begins in 1957 with “From Lake to Land of Plenty” and includes “Fifty Years of Farm & Family Fun” in 2001. The grand marshals of the 2026 parade were the fair’s past and present board members.