Wheat Land Communities' Fair

A little train goes around the Wheat Land Communities’ Fair grounds behind a tractor, carrying children. A local craftsman built it and gave it to the fair. The board put it away for a couple of years and brought it back for the 2026 fair. “We set that aside a couple of years and thought we would bring it back to keep it fresh,” said board member Lori Williams. “It was built by a local craftsman who donated it to the fair and it’s been a very popular attraction.” For 2026 the board also expanded the entertainment budget so that more of the program came with admission. The added entertainment included face painting, balloon art, Lego crafts, races, contests, and games for children.

The fair runs Thursday through Sunday of Labor Day weekend. The 2026 fair ran September 3 through 6. The grounds lie about a mile north of Historic Downtown Ritzville, at 811 East Main Avenue. They hold thirteen permanent buildings, an amphitheater, livestock barns, and a campground, with the Ritzville Rodeo arena beside it. The Columbia Basin Herald noted in 2023 that the fair has no carnival, no big-name musical acts, and no clowns wandering the grounds. Williams told the paper in 2026, “It’s somewhere you can go and get an old-time traditional feeling, and you’re comfortable letting your kids roam the grounds and experience all that it has to offer. It’s more of a feeling than (one) specific thing.”

Kraut runza and roast chicken by the half

The food vendors are mostly local. They sell baked goods, barbecue, teriyaki, and ice cream. In 2023 there were also tacos, homemade popcorn balls, and elephant ears. Many of the civic groups count their fair booth as their biggest fundraiser of the year. “We try to offer a wide variety without duplicating,” Williams said that year. “We have, obviously, burgers. Roast beef and cheddar is one of the popular ones. Our Lions Club does roasted chicken. You can buy it by the half.”

The Lions Club also makes the fair’s signature dish, the kraut runza, a meat and cabbage roll that nods to the area’s German heritage. “It’s basically a German Hot Pocket,” Williams said. “It’s hamburger and cabbage in a bread pocket.”

The show ring, the barns, and the arena

Youth livestock is at the center of the program. Williams said in 2026 that participation in 4-H and FFA has grown. In 2023 the exhibitors showed sheep, steers, goats, rabbits, and poultry. Each animal is weighed at check-in by the fair’s official Scalemaster, Garrett Templin. Templin served as Hog Superintendent before taking that job, and he received the fair’s Lifetime Service Award in 2026. On Showmanship Day the fair posted that its exhibitors were “getting gussied up.” The show ends in the Junior Livestock Sale, where local businesses, families, and individuals buy the animals the young people raised. “Our community (has a lot) to do with it,” Williams said, “from support and encouragement in beginning the project all the way through the market sale, where we have generous community support, rewarding the kids for the projects that they raise and their involvement in the industry.”

The barns and exhibit halls are run by volunteer superintendents. After the 2026 fair, board president Fritz Coon gave his annual President’s Awards to three of them. Erika Hennings and Jullie Simmelink were retiring from the Horse Department, and Linda Erdman from the Baking Department. Debbie Chapman, superintendent of Spinning, Weaving and Wool, received that year’s Black & White ribbon from the Washington State Fair Commission. On the Friday of the 2026 fair, a pair of glasses found near the livestock barn waited in the fair office for its owner.

The 2023 program shows the range of what else goes on:

• Thursday: a youth dance called the Showring Shuffle and a Jackpot Playday at the rodeo arena.
• Friday: two shows by Bugs ‘n Snakes, a traveling show from Spokane that brings lizards, salamanders, and spiders.
• Saturday: a kiddie parade in downtown Ritzville at 10:45, the big parade at 11, a fashion review, bungee jumping, and the local band Big Dawg and the Howlers.
• Through the weekend: a gymkhana and an archery demonstration.
• Sunday: the Cow Pie Raffle, which benefits the Ritzville Livestock 4-H Club.

For the raffle, a $10 ticket buys one of 100 squares marked on the ground. Two calves are turned loose on the grid, and the holder of the square where one of them does its business wins a prize. “I grew up here in Ritzville and in the same club, we did the Cow Pie Raffle,” Williams said. “It’s just something we are excited to continue almost 40 years later.”

A few years ago the fair replaced its royalty pageants with two elected ambassadors, who represent the fair for the year. The 2026 ambassadors were Hagen Carlson and Reagan Korthuis, students at Lind-Ritzville High School and FFA members.

On Friday and Saturday nights the Ritzville Rodeo runs alongside the fair, starting at 7 p.m. sharp. The 2026 rodeo was the 56th. It featured the Wild Card Trick Riders and the Western WA Mounted Shooters, with tie-down roping among the standard events. Lynette McMillan, the rodeo’s stock contractor, spoke about it in 2023. “We travel all over, all summer long, and Ritzville is one of my favorites,” she said. “It’s a small real hometown-feeling fair... it’s sweet. I love it. I love my little fairs.”

Two fairs in one county

The fair’s Facebook page calls it Adams County’s oldest community fair. HistoryLink, the online encyclopedia of Washington history, reports that from the 1930s until 1981 the Ritzville event was called the Adams County Fair. A second fair began in Othello, in the county’s irrigated west, in the 1950s. It was known as the Tri-County Fair or the Adams County Fair West.

According to the Othello fair’s own history, a Mr. Hintze called a meeting in August 1966 of people from Ritzville, Washtucna, Lind, and Othello. The meeting started an official Adams County Fair Board to oversee both fairs. Ritzville’s became the East Adams County Fair and Othello’s the West. Each ran its own committee, and the two met with the county board every fourth month. State Department of Agriculture premium money was split at first, with two-thirds going east and one-third west. The split eventually became even.

The sources differ on how the arrangement ended:

• Coon’s account, given to the Columbia Basin Herald, is that in 1980 the State of Washington ruled that each county could have only one fair, and the Othello fair became the Adams County Fair.
• The Othello history says that in December 1980, after 14 years of split government, the county commissioners chose the West fair as the official one.
• HistoryLink dates the decision to 1981, when the Adams County Fair Commissioners named the Othello event the official county fair.

Thirteen buildings from one

HistoryLink records what happened next. Residents of Ritzville, Benge, Lind, Washtucna, and Ralston chose a new name for their fair and raised money to keep it going. According to the Herald, it reopened in 1981 as the Wheat Land Communities’ Fair, on new grounds outside Ritzville. The Wheat Land Communities’ Fair Association, organized to continue a fair in eastern Adams County, financed the move and relocated the fair with volunteers. The fair became a private event. “We’ve appreciated our independence, honestly,” Coon said. “You don’t rely on the county for anything.”

The name honors both the grain and the towns of Benge, Lind, Ritzville, and Washtucna. The association describes those towns as “only a mere shadow of the cities once known as the world’s most important grain exporters.” In 1901, HistoryLink records, Ritzville exported more wheat than any other town in the world: two million bushels, filling nearly 2,000 boxcars.

The new grounds began in 1981 with one building. Volunteers have since built the rest, paid for with donated funds and income from agricultural production. The grounds are used year-round for livestock shows, horse clinics, Bible School, and wedding receptions. Williams wrote in 2018 that volunteers spend their hours “mowing, baling, weeding, watering, and more.” They then donate their own money to Wampum, the fair’s annual fundraising dinner and auction, and pay admission to the fair like everyone else. Hay grown on the grounds is baled and sold to support the fair. In 2026 a grant paid for major electrical upgrades to the fairgrounds and the campground. “I grew up on those grounds,” Williams wrote, “and I hope my kids can say the same thing.”