Wallowa County Fair

On the Friday of fair week at the Wallowa County Fairgrounds in Enterprise, a field is marked off like a checkerboard and the squares are sold. Then a cow is released. Whichever square she poops in wins. That is Bessie Bingo, as Lisa Britton of the Baker City Herald described it in July 2026. It ran at 4 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 7, at the 2026 fair, the same hour it held on the Friday of the 2007 fair.

The 2026 Wallowa County Fair and its related events ran July 28 to Aug. 8 at the fairgrounds, 668 NW First St., according to the schedule the Wallowa County Chieftain printed. The Oregon Fairs Association’s calendar listed the fair itself as Aug. 5–8. It is a 4-H and FFA fair, with junior rodeo and livestock shows. The Wallowa County Fair Board runs it, with Brinda Stanley as chair, Mike Falk as vice chair and Gail Hillock as secretary.

From the rodeo arena to Cloverleaf Hall

The weekend before fair week belonged to the Junior Rodeo, which began at 9 a.m. on July 31 and Aug. 1, with free admission. The 4-H dog show started at 9 a.m. on Aug. 1, the day the fair opened. On Monday, Aug. 3, the Food Booth opened at 7:15 a.m. and the flag went up at 8. The 4-H horse show began that morning and ran into Tuesday, closing with a horse awards program at 7 that evening.

Cloverleaf Hall, the fairgrounds’ social center, stayed shut Monday and Tuesday for judging. It opened to the public at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 5, with coloring-contest entries on display among the exhibits. Open class is open to all, not only children, and for 2026 the Oregon Wheat Foundation sponsored a baking contest with cash prizes. By 8 that night all animals were to be in place in the barns.

Thursday, Aug. 6, was market day for livestock. Fathers served breakfast from 6 to 8 a.m. Judges gave talks before the beef, swine, sheep and goat classes, and the Grange served pie and ice cream at noon. The Grand Champion market classes for beef, sheep, swine and goat were shown at 6:30 p.m.

Friday went to showmanship. “Ever seen someone try to show a cat?” Britton asked her readers. The cats came in the small animal show, held under a tent by the Small Animal Barn at 8:30 a.m. Swine, sheep, beef and goat showmanship followed through the day. Building Healthy Families held story time at 10, and an alpaca show came at 3. The All-Around Showmanship contest closed the day at 6:30.

Family Day and the fat stock sale

Saturday, Aug. 8, was Family Day. Fathers served breakfast again from 7 to 8 a.m., and the 4-H/FFA awards program began at 8. The youngest exhibitors had PeeWee Showmanship in the barn at 10. Games on the grass followed at 11 and the FFA barbecue at 1 p.m. Cloverleaf Hall released its exhibits around midday and closed at 2:30.

At 3 p.m. the 4-H/FFA fat stock sale began, and the fair ended with it. At the 2025 sale, on Aug. 9, Avery Morgan showed her grand champion 4-H steer. It sold for $13,000, the highest price paid for any animal at that fair.

A bucking contest and a bitten ear

Wallowa County held its first fair in 1907, “just 11 years after the last horseback bank robbery hereabouts,” as Richard Cockle put it in The Oregonian in 2011. Brinda Stanley, testifying to the Oregon Legislature in 2021, placed that first fair at the present Event Center and Fairgrounds. A photograph from 1910 shows the fair parade going down Main Street in Enterprise. A postcard held by the Wallowa History Center shows the La Grande band marching in a fair parade at SW First and Main.

The wooden grandstand went up in the 1920s. During fair week of 1937, the Chieftain reported, Ray Zimmerly did commercial flying at Enterprise. The fair’s amusement offerings closed with “a large and lively program Saturday afternoon” before a good crowd. Cody Dodson again took first in the finals of the bucking contest, with Lyn Cooper second and Blacky McElroy third. Sixty years on, in 1997, ten-year-old Chelcee Noland won a blue ribbon in junior showmanship at the county 4-H horse show.

Cloverleaf Hall has its own stories. Rancher Rod Childers told Cockle about two local men who took to wrestling each other at the cattlemen’s dances there. “They’d take off their boots and growl like a couple of bears,” he said. One man’s wife objected, but “the dance was a-going on and the booze was a-flowing,” and her husband ignored her. “To get him to stop, she grabbed hold of him and bit his ear.”

A centennial and a gallon of white paint

The 2007 fair, held Aug. 4–11, took the theme “100 Years of Heritage, 1907 to 2007.” It had a scarecrow contest judged in part on how well each figure expressed the theme. The Hermiston Watermelon Growers sponsored a seed-spitting contest. There was also a tractor driving contest, a teen dance on Friday night, and the Joseph Junior Rodeo on the closing Saturday.

Four years later the fairgrounds was short of money. State funding for the fair fell from $52,000 to $36,000 in 2010, County Commissioner Mike Hayward told The Oregonian. In November 2010, county voters rejected a fair district with $100,000 in funding, 53 percent to 46. In December the county eliminated the fair manager’s job.

Volunteers took up the work in the summer of 2011. They replaced old boards in the beef barns and planned to spread 500 cubic yards of donated mulch in the arena. They also set out to paint the grandstand, which had gone unpainted for 19 years. Organizers talked of asking each resident to bring a gallon of white paint and a brush and work until the bucket was empty. Sondra Lozier, chair of Hells Canyon Mule Days, held at the grounds each September, reckoned upwards of 400 people would join work crews that year. “The fairgrounds is really the cornerstone of the county,” she said.

The grounds serve the county the rest of the year. Cloverleaf Hall has held weddings, dances, cowboy poetry readings, old-time fiddlers contests and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation dinners. Stanley’s 2021 testimony counted 910 uses of the fairgrounds in 2019. She noted that the hall, the largest indoor meeting space in the county, was then the site of the local health care district’s Covid-19 vaccinations. The grounds had also served as an incident command post for wildfires and floods.

Todd Wagner, an Enterprise businessman who worked on the 2011 crews, had entered strawberry jam at the fair one year as a boy and biscuits the next. “I never showed animals, I was the only ranch kid that didn’t,” he said. “I figured we had animals back at the ranch and didn’t have to bring them to town.” He saw no alternative to the volunteers. “If the fairgrounds goes, what is there here?”