Whidbey Island Fair

The ticket gates open at nine in the morning, and the first building past them is a long hall of peeled fir poles with a river rock chimney. The Whidbey Island Fair fills these grounds on Camano Avenue for four days each July, Thursday through Sunday, and stays open until ten or half past on the first three nights. The 2026 fair ran July 23 through 26. The Whidbey Island Fair Association, the nonprofit that stages it, has set the 2027 fair for July 22 through 25. The grounds’ red barns stand at the Camano Avenue approach to town, which the South Whidbey Record has called a “greeting card entrance into Langley.”

Four days on the Midway

The 2026 program ran across three stages. The Eva Mae Gabelein Midway Stage, billed on the fair’s own notices as the EMG, closed each night with a band: The Wax Lips Band on Thursday at 8, The Heels on Friday at 8:30, and Hit Machine on Saturday at 8:30, playing disco and dance music “from the 70’s to Today.” On Sunday at 5 the Dueling Hobbits, a dueling-piano act, took requests to close the fair. Earlier slots went to Those Guys, Cale Moon’s country set, Ike and the Old Man, the SeaNotes Big Band, the Island Jazz Collective, the junior dancers of Whidbey Island Dance Theatre, and the South Whidbey Cheer Camp. The Shifty Sailors sang at Center Stage near the Fiddle Faddle Farm. The association says it loves “promoting local bands from on and around the Island.”

Between introductions the emcee, Paul Isaak, juggled on the Midway and wheeled around what he calls his Tallest Game Show. Other performers worked the grounds. Sheriff Fowler rode a giant chicken that, by the fair’s account, “has been known to lay plastic eggs with prizes.” Clucky gave a poultry variety show on a stage outside the chicken barn. Penelope the Clown twisted balloon animals by the Fiddle Faddle Farm. Karen Quest did cowgirl tricks, and Coventry and Kaluza juggled, hula-hooped, and put dogs through tricks on the Pole Building stage. A beer garden opened at noon, offered by the fair as a place to sit “while your children free range on the carnival rides.” The Record lists curly fries among the fair’s oldest habits, eaten “by the cart load.”

The arena carried the livestock program. The rodeo ran Friday at 6, with The Heels singing the national anthem before their Midway set. Craig Wilder brought his spotted draft horses for a daily show and kept them in Horse Barn No. 1 between turns. The Marilyn Gabelein Memorial Barrel Race ran for its sixth year on Saturday evening. On Sunday the logging show put youth on the poles at 11 and adults at 1, with pole climbing, log rolling, and axe throwing.

Saturday is the full day. The parade steps off at 10. In 2026 it took a new route from Island Church to the Midway, with Mike Gallion as grand marshal and the Mutiny Bay Brass Band marching before its noon set. West Coast Country Heat two-stepped on the Midway when the parade ended. At noon the youth livestock auction opens for market pigs, cows, sheep, and goats raised by local children. The fair advertised it with “Who needs to fill up their freezer?” On the last morning it urged fairgoers to come early and “wish the auction animals off on their next journey.”

In the exhibit halls, 4-H and open-class entries fill the tables. The fair’s call for perishable entries read “Gather your Fruits, Pluck your Vegetables, Pick your Pretty Blooms, Get your Buns Out of the Oven.” A Whidbey News-Times editorial of 2012 named the rest: art, crafts, canned foods, flowers, garden produce, farm animals, and fancy quilts. Children build vegetable critters for judging. Diane Divelbess, a painter and a past president of the fair association, was directing the Fine Art Exhibition at the time of a 2016 interview. Each day of the fair has a pie-eating contest limited to six eaters, first come, along with judging for the cutest baby and the best moustache.

The Pole Building and thirteen barns

The hall by the gate is the Pole Building, the first structure raised on these grounds. Construction began in 1935 and ended in 1937, with the Works Progress Administration paying for materials and local labor. The work gave local men almost two years of employment. Historic Langley and the News-Times both report it was considered the largest pole building in the United States at the time. Workers used mainly native materials. Fir poles raised the walls, and log trusses spanned the open floor. A wooden chandelier lights the auditorium. The river rock chimney once drew for the kitchen’s wood cook stove and carries a small star pattern near its top.

Over the decades the building has served as a dance pavilion, a roller skating rink, a theater, school classrooms and a cafeteria, and an exhibit hall. It was renamed for fair manager Gust Skarberg in 2001. In 2012 it went on the Langley Register of Historic Places. Shortly after, it and 13 other barns on the grounds were named to the Washington State Heritage Barn Registry, which made this the first fairgrounds in the state with all its barns listed. The local historian Harrison Goodall pressed the nomination. “There’s an extraordinary quality of craftsmanship in these buildings,” he told the News-Times. “The builders took care in their design and implementation.”

Other buildings came later. A slab-wood entrance and a row of permanent concession booths along the north end went up in 1955, along with exhibit buildings and horse barns. The South Whidbey Historical Society moved two log cabins here, the McLeod cabin in 1980 and the Brooks Hill cabin in 1996. A barn named for Raymond Gabelein Sr. was built in 1984 to hold antique farm equipment. The Jim Eakin Arena for equestrian events followed in 1998. The Record once listed the 12.7-acre site as “historic barns, vendor booths, equestrian arena, campground, commercial kitchens, music stages and renegade rabbits.”

A cedar pole and two accounts

For more than 70 years a 50-foot story pole of Western red cedar stood at the Pole Building. An eagle with spread wings sat at the top, and a man in a single-feather headdress anchored the base. Between them were carved a rock, an octopus holding a salmon, a bird, a bushy-tailed fox, a whale, a mouse on a pedestal, a spider, a six-rayed sea star, and two faces. On June 6, 2018, the Port of South Whidbey wrapped the pole in a wood frame and lowered it, for safety and for a restoration assessment. Its base had rotted. As of the Record’s July 2018 report, it lay on its side between the Burrier and Turner buildings, with original paint still showing on the eagle’s head.

The pole had been credited to William Shelton, a Snohomish carver born on Whidbey Island in 1868 who carved story poles from 1912 until his death in 1938. In the summer of 2017, curators and carvers from the Tulalip Tribes examined it and identified it as a Shelton pole. In February 2018 the historical society’s president, Bill Haroldson, heard a different account from Jim Brevig, then 87. “Jim Brevig said his uncle, Paul Cunningham, carved the pole and he had this older Native American telling him what to carve, what order to carve in and exactly what paint to use,” Haroldson said. Brevig said two poles were carved on the family’s Bayview property but could not fix the year. A cousin, Albert Hagglund, 83, remembered “two tall totem poles and two short ones in my grandfather’s yard. There was an Indian showing him how to carve it.”

Tessa Campbell, a Tulalip curator, found no photograph or document proving Shelton carved the fairgrounds pole. She did find that the two men knew each other. “We have located archival materials in our collection that depict that Shelton and Cunningham were good friends,” she said, with photos and newspaper accounts of them giving public presentations together. Haroldson summed up where the research stood: “Now the only definitive answer we have is, ‘We don’t know.’” He still judged the pole worth saving, calling it “a legacy of William Shelton and his efforts to bridge the gap between Native America and White America.” The port’s outgoing director, Angi Mozer, said the intention was to have the Tulalip Tribes restore it.

From Coupeville to a chicken ranch

The fair is older than its grounds. In 1912 nine Coupeville men formed the Island County Fair Association on private stock and held fairs at the play pavilion there. According to Historic Langley, the fairs ended after 1916 because people had trouble traveling to Coupeville on the roads of the day. The society’s Bob Waterman tells it more simply: the fair began in Coupeville in 1912 and moved to Langley in 1917.

The 1917 revival took place at the Langley marina, with exhibits in the large dance pavilion. To draw entries, J.C. Langley, the town banker and nephew of the town’s namesake, James Weston Langley, made an offer to the women of the area. Any woman who agreed to provide an exhibit could hunt for a gold coin he had dropped somewhere on his farm.

Standard Oil bought the pavilion property in 1921 and demolished the pavilion the next year to make room for oil storage tanks. In November 1922 seven men formed a new association, funded by memberships, and moved the fair to Cascade Avenue. Events were held on the grass south of the school, and exhibits went into the gymnasium. A photograph from that year shows Mayor Margaret McLeod among the exhibits. The association reincorporated as a Washington nonprofit in 1923. As the fair and the school census both grew, it went looking for land of its own.

In 1934 Albert Melsen, a local builder, advanced the association $300 for J.O. Blackford’s six-acre chicken ranch on the present site. Seven more acres were added later. The association’s own history says it owned and kept up these grounds through the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s with volunteer labor and “without County involvement.” In 1962 it deeded the property to Island County on one condition: the land could never be sold without a majority vote of the descendants of the South Whidbey pioneer families who built it, as represented by voters within the South Whidbey School District.

Three names and two keepers

The fair kept its county name for a century. In 2012 it became the Whidbey Island Fair. The News-Times editorial that August reported the official title as the Whidbey Island Area Fair, “already shortened in people’s minds.” Camano Island, the county’s other island, had long joined Stanwood for a fair of its own. The new standing also let the fair draw entries from outside the county at a time when 4-H animal entries and dairy and beef cattle were dwindling. “A cow looks pretty much the same whether it’s from Oak Harbor or Mount Vernon,” the editorial said. The association describes the move as becoming an area fair, which state statute defines as a fair representing more than a single county’s citizens. Its history page adds that “Like drive-ins, good fairs are hard to find and worth keeping!” The association received federal 501(c)(3) status in 2002.

Later the association and the county commissioners disagreed over the cost of keeping up the aging buildings, and the association ended its contract with the county. After voters approved a transfer, the Port of South Whidbey took over care of the grounds in 2017. The port and the Record date the handover to March 31. Historic Langley gives March 23. The port maintains the grounds, and the association still runs the fair. The port rents the halls and kitchens through the rest of the year, and the grounds have since hosted weddings, bingo, woodworking classes, and late-night jamming during Djangofest Northwest. In 2019 the port commissioners named the site the Whidbey Island Fairgrounds and Events Center. “Now we know what name to use,” said Larry Lehtonen, then the fairgrounds director, “so we can go ahead informing people that the fairgrounds is more than just a place for a once-a-year fair.”