Wahkiakum County Fair

For three days in late August the fairgrounds on Fairgrounds Road in the Skamokawa Valley fill with what Wahkiakum County has grown, raised, baked, and built. The 2026 fair, the 118th, ran August 20 through 22 under the theme “American Pride Countywide.” The Fair Board dedicated it to former Commissioner Gene Strong “in recognition of his dedication to the fair,” and recognized the Elephant Ear Booth for its many years as a vendor.

The board names the county’s working life as the fair’s subject: logging and timber, cottonwood farming, commercial fishing, dairy farming, small family farms, local artists and craftsmen. The 1976 National Register nomination for the Skamokawa Historic District describes the same country. Three fertile valleys meet here at the southern edge of the Willapa Hills, and rainfall runs over 100 inches a year. Farming and logging have occupied the valleys since early settlement, and the form found several small family farms that had “changed very little in the past 50 years.”

Quilts, swine, and Tough Trucks

The week before the 2026 fair, residents carried their entries into the T Building and the Youth Building. One evening brought needlework, patchwork and quilting, sewing, canning, dried foods, homemade beer and wine, art and photography, antiques and collectibles, and automotive entries. The next brought dairy, honey and wax, eggs, forage and grains, vegetables, fruits and nuts, baked goods, homemade candies, decorated cakes, cut flowers, potted plants, and edible flowers.

The animals fill the barns. The Wahkiakum County Eagle photographed the 117th fair in 2025 and recorded “peace and quiet Friday morning in the swine barn.” On Saturday a turkey joined the parade of animals. The 4-H clubs show livestock, gardening, cooking, and crafts, and science too. At the 2022 fair, visitors stopped to look at robots the local clubs had built.

The 2026 fair added Tough Trucks, held Saturday, August 22, at 7:00 p.m. on a track built from donated dirt with skid steers and operators lent for the job. The board said it hoped to make the event a regular part of the fair. Earlier in August a pop-up dinner at the fairgrounds celebrated the year’s Fair Princesses. The official T-shirts carry designs from a contest: two community favorites chosen by Facebook vote, plus several picked by the Fair Board. The Fair Book is handed out at local businesses and the fair office.

Patty Dursteler, fair manager since 2013, told the Eagle after the 2022 fair: “We had a wonderful fair. It was probably the best fair we’ve had since I took over as manager in 2013. There were a lot more people. We doubled our gate from 2019.” She credited the new asphalt and the beer garden. Entries ran higher than usual, and the paper reported pies aplenty.

The grounds stay in use between fairs. In 2026 they hosted the William Tell Archery Tournament XXXVIII and the PNW Regional Chili Cook-Off. The fair office keeps short weekday hours, and in the summer of 2026 the board posted a standing invitation: “If the gates are open, come on in!”

The 2008 Follies at the Grange

Next door to the fairgrounds stands the Skamokawa Grange hall, built by community volunteers around 1948 and a contributing structure in the Skamokawa Historic District. By the Eagle’s account it was the center of Skamokawa activities until a flood twelve years before 2008, after which it was abandoned. The Grange was reactivated about 2005. Members and neighbors then cleaned up the flood damage and gave the hall a new roof, foundation repair, rewiring, and a custom velvet stage curtain.

That stage held the fair’s hundredth birthday. In June 2008 the Fair Board and the Skamokawa Grange put on a 1908 vaudeville show, the Smoky Water Follies. It played at 7:30 p.m. on June 20 and 21, with a matinee at 2 p.m. on June 22. Adele Swift directed, Sunrise Fletcher was musical director, and the Eagle named twenty-nine people in the cast and crew. Before the Saturday show the Fair Board served a New York steak dinner on the fairgrounds, with red wine included. Show tickets were $10 and dinner tickets $20. The program included “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” The fair budget was then “in jeopardy,” the paper wrote, and seating at the Grange was limited to 150.

Three acres from Alexander Moe

The sources disagree on the fair’s beginning. The Eagle’s 2008 account says it began in Grays River in 1908 and moved to its present location in 1912, and the fair’s own count of 118 years follows that reckoning. The Wahkiakum Chamber of Commerce says the first county fair was held in Gray’s River in 1912, the second in Cathlamet, and the third in Skamokawa, its present home.

The town it settled in was built on water. The National Register form describes Skamokawa on the Columbia River estuary, thirty miles from Cape Disappointment. Its sloughs and creeks branch “somewhat like the branches of a tree.” Before 1917 there were no roads to neighboring river settlements, and everything came and went by boat. Homes faced the slough with a dock in front, and the town was known as “Little Venice.” The first store, the Moe Store, opened in 1872, and Albert Moe became postmaster in 1873.

The Moe family also supplied the fair’s ground. In 1915, by the Chamber’s account, three acres were bought from Alexander Moe at $100 an acre as a permanent site. The record compiled from the National Register nomination dates the County Fair Exhibition Hall to 1914 and calls it the first building on the fairgrounds: a single story, gable-roofed, with shiplap siding. The Commercial building followed in 1917. In 1918 Tom Monroe built the T-Building for $3,200.

The 1914 fair, the Chamber writes, “was a complete success.” The Ferndale Creamery of Grays River took first place with its butter. The Ladies Aid Society of Skamokawa served chicken dinners at 35 cents each. Daylight and evening dances at the Fredrickson hall and Silverman’s new hall “kept up a perpetual whirl of enjoyment.”